Seemingly overnight, Youtube and the major music labels have undergone a horrible process of erasing large swaths of music television history.

The original music videos, as they would have appeared in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or even as recently as the 00s, used to be the version easily accessible online, but in the highest available quality, which is DVD quality. There was nothing wrong with that, and in fact, that was preferable.

For some bizarre reason, music labels decided that however it just wasn't good enough anymore, because anything in SD must be replaced with HD "remasters," just for the sake of it. The real way these artifacts of cultural history looked has disappeared overnight (this process allegedly began around 2019, but I'm only noticing most of these changes finalizing this year). Perhaps they feared these non-HD videos might scare away younger audiences?

Well, I am one of the aforementioned younger audience here, present and accounted for. I'm not talking out of some childhood nostalgia, since most of these came out before I was born. I don't want music videos from the past to look like they came out today. I want them to look like a window into a world I never knew. To be a time machine and allow me to experience those years today.

The original music videos, despite or perhaps precisely because they were not in HD, look far better, the same way the Simpsons' early years look so much better in SD DVD quality than the cold, flat, sterile, lifeless look they have in HD. 

That isn't to say many of these no doubt painstaking efforts to remaster aren't well done. On the contrary, it is stunning to see such high levels of detail from videos that have been around forever. (Many however, do not even look good. They look like a.i.-upscaled versions of the DVD quality version, and the upscaler algorithm often messes up the image quality when it has to make a best-guess on things that aren't obvious.)

That's not the point, though. 

The point is, that's not how the era actually looked, and to pretend otherwise are revisionist attempts to erase history from the record, to whitewash it away, and to deny future generations like myself the opportunity to enjoy these videos the way they actually were.

It's like going to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa, then complaining that the real painting doesn't look anywhere as good as a google image of the Mona Lisa does on your 4K OLED computer monitor, so you take down the real Mona Lisa and replace it with a print out of that 4K computer image.

Furthermore, there seems to be a crass disconnect between simply resolution/clarity/level of detail, and whether that makes the video actually look better.

Television and videos made in the 80s and 70s were designed to look good on the TVs audiences at the time would have been watching them on.

Take Michael Jackson's iconoclastic "Thriller" video, for example. The zombies in the original video looked like the horror villains they're supposed to be, but blow that video up to 1080p, and what were once scary now look like cheap Halloween costumes. The effects and costumes look corny and fake because you're viewing at a far greater level of detail than was ever expected to be seen.

Furthermore, these remasters often do far more than simply change the resolution. They also alter the lighting and coloring of videos.

This is what Thriller's remaster looks like.

And this is what Thriller the original, but upscaled to HD, looks like.

As you can tell, there's a huge difference. The former has the clarity of videos released today, and that's exactly why it looks terrible, to me at least. You lose that tv magic of the era. All the little subtleties and imperfections are not mistakes to be corrected, but exactly what makes the video great! The same way the little nuances in a vocalist's vibrato and slight pitch inaccuracies are what make a live performance sound so much better than auto-tuned recordings where the singer robotically hits the note with perfect intonation every single time.

 

To stick with Michael Jackson, take a look at his "Beat It," music video. There is a stark difference between the original and the remaster. The lighting has been severely changed, removing that beautiful bloom present in many videos of the era, that slight blur that looks so nice, and making everything redder. Some commenters have even come to the conclusion now that the iconic "Thriller" jacket was never orange to begin with but in fact red, simply because the "restoration" team increased the values of the videos' reds in After Effects or whatever program they used, altering the original look. 

Finally, the HD remasters sometimes introduce a significant amount of graininess missing from the lower resolution but otherwise higher quality SD DVD version.

As one final example from Michael Jackson, here is the as of yet untouched video for "Bad" versus a fan-made HD remaster. The HD version is noticeably very grainy, something that probably wasn't that big of a deal on DVD or VHS quality, whatever the original source was, but in 1080p HD it looks rather distracting. All color has been removed too and the video looks like it has a sepia filter over it. The official video on Youtube looks much cleaner despite being only SD.

Of course, Michael Jackson is far from the only victim whose legacy is being tarnished, and it's not just music videos but live performances too. 

 

 

I don't know why you would want a rock video from the 80s to look like one made today. The 80s was the era of rock gods. The genre was at its prime. Modern videos look worse.

 

 

Frame rate or refresh rate is another issue worth discussing. Sure, in video games, particularly competitive ones, higher frame rates are objectively better. 60 FPS (frames per second) is ideal for most, and for pros, higher refresh rate monitors of 120 Hz or 144 Hz are even better.

But to generalize that to all footage is stupid and wrong. Not everything looks better in 60 FPS, and tv/movies in particular have been standard for so long at 24-30 FPS, (a number originally picked for economic reasons, being the fewest number of frames that still provide the illusion of continuous motion) that to have anything other than that counter-intuitively feels less real. For a long time, these higher frame rate videos have been associated with trashy day-time soap operas. It looks unnatural and slightly creepy seeing this famous Metallica show in Seattle '89 with 60 FPS (the additional frames no doubt being added by a.i.). It looks bad and it invents new information that may not have even been there in the original footage.

What is the bottom line?

The ultimate sin here was not in releasing these HD versions as alternatives to appreciate, but in replacing the original videos altogether, making them now impossible to find online.

So even though most of these HD remasters were released this year or last year, on the channel description they still claim they were uploaded circa 2009 or so. This is disingenuous and done I can only imagine to preserve the statistics on the old video (x amount of views, y amount of likes, etc.). If these videos were re-released as separate new videos, I would have less of a problem. But it's the removal and replacement of the original videos, and the inability to view past decades anymore as they really were that is the real crux of the matter.

I call on anybody who cares for the preservation and archival of cultural history to put pressure on Youtube and the big music labels like UMG to restore these old music videos and live shows to their proper, original form, and to keep the HD remastered videos as separate, distinct videos. Allow people to pick and choose which version they'd rather experience, and keep the way it really was alive for posterity.