R.E.M. Debuts New Video At Madison Square Garden

Michael Stipe thinks the music video is a “dead medium” — but the R.E.M. singer still wants the band’s songs to be accompanied by some kind of visuals.

So instead of hiring a top video director to create a clip for
their new song “Man-Sized Wreath,” they hired an advertising
agency. And rather than debut the finished clip on a music network,
they took it directly to their fans Thursday night and previewed
snippets for a sold-out crowd at their concert at Madison Square
Garden.

Stipe said it’s just the latest way the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame band is trying to create new ways to connect to its audience.

To promote the release of their latest album “Accelerate,” the
group has stepped up their Internet presence, starting Web sites
that allowed their audience to see the band as it created their
songs and others that gave fans audience a chance to take R.E.M.
footage and use it in their own video creations.

“It’s what I call invisibility of process. Basically we’re
allowing everyone who cares to kind of peek in on all of the
process of creating something, rather than just being handled the
finished product at the end, or the finished piece at the end,”
Stipe told The Associated Press on Thursday, a few hours before the
show.

Though R.E.M. has made some award-winning videos in the past,
including “Losing My Religion” in the early ‘90s, Stipe said the
time of the traditional video has passed.

“It is what it is, and I think anyone who refutes that is an
idiot in 2008,” he said. “We can all agree as a medium music
videos really found their place in pop culture in the 1990s, (and
have been) replaced by the Internet in the 21st century.”

It’s one reason the trio hired the Canadian ad agency Crush Inc.
to create the visuals for “Man-Sized Wreath.”

“The music video is a dead medium so I didn’t want to go to
that industry to create a piece,” he said.

But while Stipe is adamant about videos being over, he’s not
quite sure about what will eventually take their place to promote
new songs.

“That’s the itch that we’re trying to scratch, or the question
we’re trying to answer,” he said.