New media is different than old media. Books are great, and I love them – but hypertext is way way better. I love music videos – they are great, but why aren’t more of them using the amazing new tools available to us.

I want more music videos like this:

Johnny Cash – Ain’t No Grave.
This is the king I think. The song is worth it. The artist Johnny Cash – nuff said. This is a crowd-sourced participatory art music video that you can swim through in multiple dimensions.
They took a music video and gave everyone who loves Johnny Cash a way to pay tribute. Go on there and you can draw a frame from the music video. You can rate the frames of others. And then you can push your way through the dimensional space of all this and watch the video with highest rated frames or most abstract frames or any of the other dimensions they’ve carved up. It’s a beauty and executed perfectly. I hope everyone clicks through to this.

Arcade Fire – The Wilderness Downtown
This was the first new media music video I heard about. Couldn’t get a browser to run it for the longest time. It pushed the limits so far and does so many things.

Watch the video. Birds fly through all the different frames. You run along the streets where you grow up, you write a letter to yourself and watch it grow like trees. A dream.

Yung Jake – http://e.m-bed.de/d
I’m not as much of a fan of this one because the music isn’t as good, the rhymes are sloppy. This perfectly marries the content to the form though. It’s about being shared, being embedded, the new narrative of music distribution. And it shows as it tells.

RO.ME – 3 Dreams of Black
Can’t watch it – don’t have WebGL. Supposed to be good.

Ellie Goulding – Lights
Ditto.

Chris Bathgate – Big Ghost
This is the counterpoint. See, this doesn’t feel like a new video. This feels like it’s just a new trick on an old concept. 3D is so hyped and so pointless most of the time. I mean seriously, BOOKS tell stories. We don’t need 3D unless it adds something.