Notes on a Lost Art: Neil Young- “This Note’s for You”

1. No one talks about this video anymore, but it’s one of the most influential of all time. Director Julien Temple invented some tiny flourishes: The inter-diegetic interruption of the music proper at 3:03 is now de rigeur. And he perfected some other elements, such as the self-serious satire and goofy half-narrative that would inform videos from then on. (The structure of “This Note’s for You” is basically the instruction manual for at least three Eminem videos, right down to the lampooning of Michael Jackson. I wish Neil Young had sued Eminem for infringing upon the intellectual property he infringed upon himself, but I don’t think Young is capable of such irony.) Released in 1988, when most videos were still incoherent visual mish-mashes, “This Note’s for You” was way ahead of its time.

2. Scared of legal action from the Gloved One, MTV initially banned the video because of what they claimed was a violation of its policies against product placement. Of course, Young’s mention of corporate slogans, as well as his incendiary allusions to popular advertisements, were actually a condemnation of product placement, not an affirmation of it. In one of its unforgettable flip-flops, the channel then awarded a video they didn’t play a slew of VMAs to prove just how in on the joke they were.

3. I have embedded the video using something called VodPod because, ironically, YouTube plays ads before and during its hosting of “This Note’s for You”. Neil Young would be furious if he knew what the Internet was.