Hip-hop superstar Drake’s 5 minute 12 second music video for Toosie Slide is a sad boy meditation on soulless rooms and lifeless splendour. Released on 3 April, it became one of the most provocative and controversial visual commentaries of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this essay, Jason King reflects on Drake’s promotion of his music through video virality at a time of global contagion, reaffirming problematic class distinctions and the tension between the black indoors and outdoors in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis and worldwide economic instability.

In the 1970s television shows, pop music programmes and musical theater provided fertile grounds for experiments with audiovisual language from which eventually the music video sprouted. To illustrate this, Liselotte Doeswijk discusses a number of underexposed or underestimated – and often lost – experiments from Dutch television history.