The Director Behind Some of the Most Iconic Music Videos of the 2000s
I match the profile of perhaps Dave Meyers’s most notorious type of fan.
As the director began making regular appearances on MTV’s Making the Video in the early 2000s, I hit puberty and set about adjusting my tastes to the pop-culture sights and sounds available to me. Meyers is, in part, responsible for many of them.
I can remember sitting on the island countertop in my parents’ kitchen, neck craned back, unblinking eyes trained on the TV screen where Britney Spears sat perched on a glittering star, tonguing her way through “Lucky.” MTV’s cameras flitted between Spears lip-synching on set and crew members hovering just outside the frame. Meyers appeared on camera almost as much as Spears herself, explaining the video concept and orienting the viewer to whichever scene they were shooting.
Making the Video offered a “private” glimpse at the work that went into videos that would then land on TRL’s countdown for weeks on end. The MTV machine was in full swing, fueled by the piercing howl of teenage girls—myself included—and pop-music enthusiasts, with creators like Meyers toiling inside.
The video for “Lucky” premiered in 2000—the first of three years in Meyers’s career where his work was, to me, inescapable on TV. A sampling of his early-aughts prolificity: Outkast’s “B.O.B”; Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real”; Enrique Iglesias’s “Be With You” (with a cameo by Shannon Elizabeth); DMX’s “Party Up (Up in Here)”; Kid Rock’s “American Badass” (and the preceding two singles that put the rapper and possible senatorial candidate on the map); Mya’s “Free”; Ja Rule and Ashanti’s “Always On Time”; and No Doubt’s “Hey Baby.” He’s also responsible for handfuls of music videos with Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Dave Matthews Band, Creed, Pink, Janet Jackson, Celine Dion, Korn—it’s a lot.
Browsing the core years of his music-video domination is an experience similar to skimming posts targeted to the mid-Millennial set—“Only ’00s Teens Will Remember These Ancient Cellphones”; “45 Songs That Were Definitely on Your 7th-Grade Pump-Up Mix”; “These Co-Workers
