Madonna is in ”Hollywood”
MTV’s internet audience has named Madonna the greatest music video star ever, according to a new special.
Madonna’s “innovation, creativity, and contribution to the music video art form” puts her at the top of the list during “The Greatest Video Stars” which aired on MTV, the channel said. The list of greatest video artists was determined through a recent poll conducted at www.mtv.com.
“The video has really become a marriage between the artist and our audience,” says Michele Dix, senior vice president of music and talent programming at MTV and MTV2. The list, she says, includes “the broad entertainer” as well as “artists who were just there to make a video all their own.”
Madonna’s lexicon of videos includes controversial works such as “Like A Prayer“, in which she dances in front of a burning cross; “Justify My Love“, involving sadomasochism; and “What It Feels Like for a Girl“, banned for its violent content. “Her ability to always intrigue the audience captives (viewers),” Dix says.
“Her last video reinvented her in a cowgirl image. She is someone who is truly a sex symbol and she was (seen) in this cowboy attire with a hip-hop beat.” The MTV online honor comes at a time when Madonna was having yet more video woes. She pulled her original video cut of “American Life“, her current single, because of its political imagery. In the original video, Madonna dances in a military uniform and throws a grenade in the lap of President Bush. Her new “performance” version has Madonna still in uniform but dancing in front of a collage of images.
The MTV list also names 1990s rock act Guns N Roses at No. 6, though the band has not had an active video on MTV in almost a decade. MTV viewers have a long memory, Dix says. “Those videos were epic,” she says of the Guns N Roses inclusion. “You felt like you were watching a rock band in their real element.”
Artists are “taking making their videos as seriously as they do writing their lyrics,” Dix says. Many are involved in finer details of the video shoots these days. Five years ago, she says, artists weren’t as involved in the video production, leaving many of the decisions up to record labels and marketing gurus. The poll include a wide range of music styles, from hard rockers (Aerosmith, Limp Bizkit) to hip-hop (Eminem, Dr. Dre).
MTV would not release an exact number of how many votes were cast.
The Top 10:
Madonna
Eminem
Janet Jackson
Britney Spears
No Doubt
Guns N Roses
Michael Jackson
TLC
N SYNC
Mariah Carey
Source: The River 95.9
Special thanks to holidayboy