One of the most establish music video directors in the business has to be Spike Jonze. Since the early nineties, Spike Jonze has been taking the images that make up America's visual vernacular - TV shows, ad campaigns, B-movies - and turning them inside out, upside down, and into vehicles for his sly, ironic humor. He first appeared on the media map in 1994 when he directed the video for the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," a gritty, winking homage to seventies cop dramas like Starsky and Hutch. His 1995 video for Björk's "It's Oh So Quiet" riffs on Busby Berkley's choreography, and his award-winning clip for "Praise You" with the "Torrance Community Dance Group" reimagines the amateurism of America's Funniest Home Videos as Broadway spectacle.Even Jonze's commercials are full of funny remarks and sight gags lifted from the pop-culture slag heap. His Lee Jeans ad sends up superheroes when the pint-size "Buddy Lee" doll jumps into a runaway automobile to save a baby - who turns out to be in another car. His Levi's commercial mocks emergency-room dramas by having a half-dead patient and the doctors trying to revive him break into Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" to the faint bleat of an EKG monitor. That he's also directed a series of ads for Wrangler only testifies to his youth-culture persona.
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