Science & Tech Quote by Dan Hawkins

“Loads of computer graphics” lands here as a kind of aesthetic red flag: a shorthand for a music-video arms race where spectacle keeps getting louder to cover up the absence of a point of view. Hawkins isn’t making a blanket anti-technology rant so much as drawing a line between craft and clutter. The phrase “equals a terrible video” has the bluntness of a musician who’s spent time watching budgets balloon while ideas shrink. And “in my book” is doing sly work: it frames the judgment as taste, not law, but it also implies a hard-earned rulebook built from seeing trends come and go.

The subtext is about mistrust - not of computers, but of shortcuts. CGI often signals control: everything can be perfected, smoothed, made “epic.” In music-video language, that perfection can feel airless, like branding masquerading as art. Hawkins is staking a claim for the opposite: mess, presence, physicality, the camera catching something real. Even if the band isn’t literally “authentic,” the video should still look like someone took a risk rather than ordered a template.

Context matters: for rock musicians in the post-MTV, post-YouTube era, visuals are both a marketing requirement and a temptation to overproduce. Hawkins’ jab reads like a defense of performance and personality - the idea that a compelling song should be able to survive without digital fireworks, and that a strong visual concept doesn’t need a render farm to hit.