Maddie

I'll work my way around to an answer.

Humans have been borrowing from past decades (and centuries) that they weren't there for since time immemorial, a fact that I sometimes get reminded of when reading about architecture. It's wild to think that in the 19th century, people were building tons of buildings in various "revival" styles. It was still "the past", you see! How could something be "the past" even to people living in the past?? And similar brain farts.

Anyway, it's no surprise that those "revivals" have always had inaccuracies. I think a lot about the LCD Soundsystem line, "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s." The way we imagine that decade is for the most part an amplified amalgamation of many things that happened, but rarely all together at once, and often not as "refined," if you will, as the "replicas" we create.

If someone makes a throwback band - think of, like, Chromeo - it can feel "very 80s," with the drum machines and synthesizers, but if you go listen to the music that inspired it, at least in my opinion, you find that it's often just a lot... "thinner"? It feels less nailed down, less confident, and often there's simply less layering of instruments, and the individual tracks are more basic than we tend to remember.

To wit, a lot of musicians making synthpop were A) very young, B) still struggling to figure out what exactly to do with electronic instruments, which were mostly brand new at the time, and C) limited in their musical worldview, if you will. Sure, there were people with "huge record collections" in 1984, but how many records could a 19 year old starting their first band even have? Even if you bought out the whole record store it couldn't compare to the library people have access to now, both in breadth, variety, and time.

Before someone sets out to ape "an 80s band," they've listened to dozens or hundreds of songs spanning the whole decade, from tons of artists who may not have been performing at the same time or in the same places. They have 20/20 hindsight of every "lesson learned," if you will - and I think that's an accurate way of thinking about it, because it took a while for musicians to figure out what kind of hooks and riffs you could make on synthesizers that hadn't been possible with acoustic instruments.

If you make "an 80s song" in 2023, you're mashing up every stroke of genius invented by everyone from Depeche Mode and The Human League to Giorgio Moroder and - maybe unknowingly - Wendy Carlos 20 years prior, and yet the result probably won't really sound anything like any of those groups, because you've also heard a hundred bands that built on those ideas over the 40 years that followed. You can say this about any genre, but I think it's particularly applicable to synthpop and Miami Vice-type dance music. (also where's the power pop revival, damn, I want some shit that sounds like the Top Gun soundtrack.)

All this to say that I haven't really seen much that captured the "feel" of the videotape era, because mostly, people were just kind of bumbling around the technology the whole time it existed. Creatives and their fans have spent many decades trying to define "authenticity," and I'm not free of sin in this regard: authenticity, in the sense that one usually means when one says it, comes from not knowing what you're doing.

The majority of videotapes ever recorded definitely had TV shows or movies on them. The dubbed movies are usually not very appealing to anyone IME, but recorded television has always held a fascination (both then and now, as I can say having been there for the end of the tape era) because they're almost always unedited chunks of timeshifted broadcasting. The leaves and twigs are left in, the commercials and so on; even in the cases where someone actually stopped and restarted recording, they rarely lined it up precisely. Usually the next segment just pops into existence in the middle of the previous show or commercial, and the result is a very organic, stream of consciousness kind of product, often made up of incomplete parts of shows from different channels and different times.

The creation of this kind of nonlinear, incoherent mess is now considered a skill, because it's hard to do by accident anymore. Video is now made on computers, in nonlinear editors that show you exactly what you'll be getting and invite you to trim clips a frame at a time until they fit together perfectly. With extremely rapid iteration as a universal feature, who wouldn't carefully ensure that each clip ends on a fade to black instead of leaving in a 1/4 second of the show that followed?

Not, of course, that anyone rips broadcasts like that anymore. Almost nobody is recording TV except dedicated pirates - who consider themselves creators of a sort in their own right, and do their best to ensure that their product is well trimmed and cleaned up before release anyway. The rest of us, when we jump into a video editor, are usually starting with clips that already start and stop on nice sensible boundaries, and contain no irrelevancies. Thus, the era of the accidental video collage has ended, because it only existed in the first place due to the adorably quaint limitations of the broadcasting approach to video distribution.

Then we have camcorders. Virtually every videotape shot in a camcorder contained an extremely inexpert record of a vacation or a school play or a parade or a house party or something else that you really needed to be there for. That level of expertise was not likely to ever go up, because the only people you had to bounce your results off of were your family members and maybe some very patient friends, all of whom were going to lie to you about the experience.

Also, all of them would be present during the viewing. In 1988, you weren't gonna shoot a videotape and then mail copies to 500 distant viewers - you were pretty much always going to be sitting in your living room and playing a tape in front of other people you knew, at which point the only value was in the images. There was no point in recording narrative into the camera, because you could just tell them about your vacation, or whatever else you had to share, and do a much better job after the fact than you would have on the spot. So, as a result, almost nobody ever bothered to use camcorders to do much more than capture raw footage of a place or an event.

People make a lot of extremely unfounded and dubious claims about videotape being dominated by porn - I personally believe this is mostly porn industry marketing. At one point I even found a specific guy, a seller of pornography in the late 70s, who I believe is responsible for starting this meme, though I've lost the name again. But what I will say is that it's the one thing that an Average Person could make by themselves that had intrinsic value: a video of you nailing your wife does not need to be well conceived of, shot, or edited to serve its purpose, so while I don't think that people actually shot more homemade porn than anything else, I do think those were the tapes they were most likely to actually watch and enjoy repeatedly.

So: making compelling fictional works was both impractical on the formats available and extremely hard (as it always has been), and nonfiction works didn't make much sense given the performance venues available, so the room for someone to develop as a videographer / filmmaker was incredibly narrow for the first ~30 years that video was widely available. This is not true anymore.

The primary venues for amateur video production at this point are overwhelmingly internet streaming, and almost entirely on Youtube. Before someone makes their first YT video, they've consumed thousands. They've seen vlogs, dramatic readings, comedy sketches, documentaries, musical performances, and a dozen other genres that simply did not exist outside of professionally produced television up until 2006.

I'm sure there were people who bought camcorders in the 80s with imaginations fired up by the marketing that claimed you could make your own movies at home. Some manufacturers really tried to push the idea of cinematic output, and I imagine a lot of people failed to fully visualize the reality of that before investing, and were perennially disappointed by the results. But most people probably did not encounter the Ira Glass "killer taste" problem, wherein one tries to get into a creative activity but is confronted by their inability to create things on par with the pre-imagery they see in their mind. Probably, most people never really thought about how they were using their camcorders.

Almost every camcorder ever sold - from the 70s through to the 2000s - was owned by someone who had never seen any "serious works" created on one. I know that there were hyper-indie movies shot on VHS and Hi8 and whatnot, but I'd be shocked if one in fifty thousand people had ever seen one prior to the YT era.

Now, anyone who picks up a video camera is haunted by the ghosts of many who came before them and proved that that specific instrument could be used to great effect, to make works that would be regarded by many as impressively creative and entertaining. So, in 2023, by the time you see the output of any camera, new or old, it has been through pre-production; the user probably did not press REC until they had thought hard about a final product, and what footage they needed to capture in order to create it.

My assertion is that it's virtually impossible for anyone to escape this. We are now all universally aware that any camera can be used to create a Masterpiece of some kind or another, and thus, I think that the primary vibe of the VHS era, "chunk of footage shot with no plan and no real concept in mind," can never be recreated, just as "chunk of television recorded until the tape ran out and stopped" can never be recreated because the technological constraints that led to it no longer exist.

But as for the look on its own? It's pretty dope, and I'm glad people are "resurrecting" it while these machines still work. At least, when it's constrained to purely artistic effects.

When I started my YT channel I had some ideas about making videos entirely on vintage cameras from time to time. I realized, fairly quickly, that I didn't want to do that because it would make the video itself less intrinsically valuable. The reason I went for a 4K camera when I bought my current gear is that I wanted people to be able to take my footage, 10 years from now, and zoom in on it to find details that have otherwise been lost to time. If I shot in SD, you'd barely be able to make out the labels on the devices I hold up.

Now, pure didacticism is not the goal of all video productions, nor should it be, but I do see hints that the VHS Look might leak into work where it does more objective harm than people realize until the damage is done. Case in point - I love Jeremy Parish, but man, when he does his intros (which I'm pretty sure are HD that's been bounced to a VHS deck) and he holds up a game cartridge, and I can't tell what it is or what it looks like because of the low contrast and resolution, I wonder if he really thought that decision through before committing to the bit.