I watched a DVD of Radiohead's 7 television commercials last night. These are art videos of 7 tracks from The Bends and OK Computer. It is short--- around 35 minutes. There are no extras, and so we know nothing about the different directors, nor the history of music video and the relation to the work of David Bowie and David Mallet, or even how these videos fit into Radiohead's music video history.

You are just thrown into the video collection. The tracks from The Bends are: Street Spirit, Just, High and Dry and Fake Plastic Trees. The tracks from OK Computer are: Paranoid, Karma Police and No Suprises. I'm not familiar with with The Bends and this was the first time I'd heard the music from that album.

The videos are different, are all mixed up.Plastic Trees, for instance, which was the first to be produced ( by Jake Scott), closes the DVD. This collection represents the cutting edge of music video and the work is interesting and of high quality--the videography would have few equals in terms of overall quality and creativity, and the videos are the work of highly skilled individuals with a strong artistic vision. What comes through is that the world as a strange, confusing and painful place to grow up and live in.

The works stand on their own as video art. I'm going to watch them again to see a sense of the individual videos.Paranoid standout as it is the only cartoon video.