Of Mau5 And Robots

Haven't you heard? Electronic Dance Music has conquered America, so let the dick measuring begin. The stage shows have run out of geometrical shapes to plunder, the celebrity girlfriends have been claimed/encouraged to DJ, so blockbuster music videos are the new frontier – and Canadian Deadmau5 (not pronounced Dead Mao Five, more's the pity) is leading the charge with Professional Griefers.

Calling it the biggest anticlimax in dance music since The Prodigy limped into the 21^st Century with Baby's Got A Temper would probably be overstating the matter, but as an 'event' this is more John Carter than The Avengers. Borrowing part of the set from 2Pac and Dre's 1995 California Love – which arguably signaled the beginning of the hip hop music video ego wars – the Mau5 and his featured vocalist Gerard Way (My Chemical Romance) battle it out in a Real Steel style robot fighting game where only the best ego man can win.

A quick scan of Wikipedia's List Of Most Expensive Music Videos (yes, lazy researcher is lazy, but time is of the essence here) dishes out more musical misses than hits – relative flops like Michael & Janet's Scream, Madonna's Die Another Day, and Puffy, Biggie and Busta's Victory proving that throwing the GDP of a developing nation at a film crew can't paper up the cracks of lazy songwriting. (On a side note, Scorsese directed MJ's Bad, but seems to have passed up on the double-play with Weird Al's Fat. No wonder the Academy held back that Oscar for so long.)

Professional Griefers isn't a total misfire musically, though would perhaps best be served up in dub form sans Way's vocal. Ultimately, the whole affair comes across as an elaborate show reel for directors Paul Boyd (whose previous clip making high watermark was Kylie's Confide In Me) and Jeff Ranasinghe, for whom a career making big budget B-movies (Real Steel 2: Shit's Getting Real, perhaps?) surely awaits.

The Mau5's blockbuster may have set a new standard with its as-yet-unspecified but allegedly million-dollar-plus budget, but it's not the first dance music clip to break new ground. Visual zeitgeists were captured the first time dance music conquered America at the turn of the century (but don't tell the marketing boffins we remember that happening or they'll have to come up with a new hype), and either side of the millennium for that matter.

So in honour of the diameter of the shiny black medium that electronic dance music took over the world on, and because it was the best round number we could come up with, here's 12 other clips that have had a lasting impact.

Mi-Sex – Computer Games (1979)

Seriously! State of the art CGI? Check – the vector graphics of the driving game and quite-possibly-not-approved-by-George-Lucas imagery of TIE Fighters being blown up was cutting edge stuff at the time. Paranoia about corporations controlling data? Check – the band break into a computing firm long before Angelina Jolie fighting the system in a see-through top in Hackers was even a bulge in the pants of a Hollywood producer. If you listen close enough, there's even a sonic through line between Computer Games and The Presets' Youth In Trouble.

M|A|R|R|S – Pump Up The Volume (1987)

The multi-layered sampledelica of this pre-acid house revolution classic is a modern entertainment lawyer's worst nightmare, and the found footage of the accompanying video is a clever case of the carpet matching the curtains. The space race visuals set the template for much of what you saw on the screen at raves in the '90s (give or take trace elements of Usura's Open Your Mind), while the technique of repeating looped footage on audio cues was still in vogue over a decade later – see The Wiseguys' Start The Commotion and The Beatchuggers' Forever Man. (Oh look, it's Eric Clapton!)

The KLF – 3am Eternal (1991)

The first dance music 'event' video? It may well be, though chances are The KLF were taking the piss given this is a band who got country songstress Tammy Wynette to front an even more extravagant video soon after. All the overblown elements are there – the long-winded intro shots through a pre-apocalyptic cardboard cityscape, elaborate sets, and performing with a faux live band well before stadium techno had become a thing. Seminal tune as well, just quietly.

Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy (1991)

There were one-shot electronic music videos before (Underworld's Underneath The Radar) and plenty more elaborate ones of every conceivable genre after, yet Unfinished Sympathy is perhaps the most influential of them all – we might not have The Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony or Erykah Badu's Window Seat without it. FUN FACT: theMusic's resident Old Man reliably informs theMusic's semi-resident cynic that Melburnian performance artist Leigh Bowery was supposed to style the clip as “he was besties with the director [Baillie Walsh] but Bowery freaked the band out too much”. So there you go.

Daft Punk – Da Funk (1997)

Spike Jonze had been spinning simple ideas into music video gold (100%, Buddy Holly, Sabotage, et al) for many a moon before this clip introduced Daft Punk to the wider world. The track itself becomes window dressing as the clip's anthropomorphic dog makes his way through a series of misadventures on the streets of New York City, paving the way for the mascots that followed – Sonic Animation's puppets, Mr Oizo's Flat Eric, even Rex The Dog himself.

The Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up (1997)

Dropping smack bang in the middle of that other time dance music conquered America (shh!), Smack My Bitch Up captured the hedonism of the day perfectly and tacked on a Keyser Soze-esque twist at the end for good measure. The Chemical Brothers' Setting Sun was in the same ballpark, and the head-mounted cameras strapped to members of Faithless in Tarantula may have better captured the agony and ecstasy of being on a crowded dancefloor, but Liam, Keith and the gang were the ones who got the moral majority baying for blood.

TISM - Whatareya? (1998)

Predating both the amateur dance troupe of Praise You and the fitness class of Call On Me, Australian larrikins TISM were taking the piss before those music video tropes became caricatures. Any further analysis is superfluous.

Leftfield featuring Afrika Bambaataa – Africa Shox (1999)

Pre-millennium tension? Director Chris Cunningham built his career on it with 'hey guys, the world is pretty much fucked' videos for Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, and though UNKLE's Rabbit In Your Headlights did the 'guy walking through forbidding streetscape' thing first, it's no match for the 'I can't believe it's not a T-1000' visuals on display here.

The Chemical Brothers – Let Forever Be (1999)

Because Michel Gondry's split-screen, double one-shot, Memento-esque clip for Cibo Matto's Sugar Water apparently isn't EDM enough (sigh), Let Forever Be gets the nod. Even in the Gondry oeuvre this one takes visual trickery to extremes, with some of the same hallucinatory tricks memorably deployed in his 2004 feature film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Alex & Martin may even have been studying Gondry's perspective-skewing moves when they concocted the endless zoom for The White Stripes' Seven Nation Army.

Daft Punk – One More Time (2001)

“What's that, Deadmau5? A music video that looks like a feature film? So passé – we soundtracked an entire album with a feature film over a decade ago. We also pioneered the use of masks on stage and had a pyramid before you had a cube. French is also still the dominant language in parts of Canada. Drop us a line if you ever score the long-awaited sequel to The Black Hole. Au revoir!”

Benny Benassi – Satisfaction (2003)

Tim Deluxe's It Just Won't Do may have just beaten Benny to the punch when it came to objectification of the female form, but Satisfaction took things into territory so racy that certain clip shows chose to show this unutterably dull alternative clip instead. Eric Prydz's aforementioned Call On Me has its heart in a similar place (roughly around the male reproductive organ), while the clip for Lifelike & Kris Menace's 2006 classic Discopolis took this style of filmmaking to its nadir, turning a hands-in-the-air evocation of discovering utopia on the dancefloor into a leering meditation on a buxom beauty's arse.

Pendulum – Salt In The Wounds (2010)

Or Google Street View: The Music Video. Sadly, television technology hasn't quite caught up to this interactive video as yet, so you won't be able to pan and tilt while watching it on Rage. The Aussie dance-rock behemoths claimed this 360-degree video as a first, and the video is still online if you want to give the gimmick a try. Or perhaps this freshly minted one from Matchbox Twenty is more your style?

In which case, I congratulate you for making it to the end of my selection.