VIDEO : GO BACK IN TIME WITH MUSIC VIDEOS.

Byline: Ben Wener Orange County Register

Video compilations, those typically incomplete collections that attempt to summarize an artist's career in an eye-grabbing hour or so, are the backbone of the music home video market.

Forget the concerts, the documentaries, the special events, even the feeble attempts at video magazines. It's nostalgia the video generation wants in its machines - and it's what it gets in abundance.

Why else has Warner Home Video released so many of its compilations on DVD so soon? There are far worthier titles in its catalog, but in virtually no time at all, middling material like Rod Stewart's ``Storyteller'' showed up on the new format.

As if to confirm its strategy, Warner Bros. has put Madonna's ``The Immaculate Video Collection'' and Prince's ``Hits'' on DVD (each $24.95), though stupidly neither has been updated to include either act's most recent work, when there's certainly more than enough room to do so. (It's understandable in Prince's case; he and Warner Bros. are mortal enemies.)

Why are these things so popular? Because they allow us to capture a piece of our history in a tidy bundle, helping us convince ourselves that the videos for ``Like a Virgin'' or ``1999'' or ``Young Turks'' were about us, man. We lived that! This is our childhood.

Yeah, well, whatever.

More often than not, these videos just don't hold up. Major case in point: ``The Best of U2 1980-1990'' (PolyGram; $19.95 for video only), an 80-minute collection that gathers every clip from ``I Will Follow'' to ``Sweetest Thing.'' (Which is a bit of a sticking point. Technically, the song first appeared as a B-side circa 1987, but the video was shot last year.)

What struck me when taking these trips back in time, however, was just how ridiculous the band's seriousness seems. I certainly didn't think so at the time. Back then, U2 seemed like the most important band in the world. One sullen look from Bono told me the world was ruined; one wave of his white flag reassured me that we (or maybe just he) could save it. He was that charismatic.

Never mind how silly Bono looks in the primitive ``I Will Follow'' clip. Hey, they were young and needed a break. Likewise, though the ``Sunday Bloody Sunday'' bit from the ``Live at Red Rocks'' concert seems unbelievably heavy-handed now - watch how Bono ends it, on bended knee, as if King Arthur just honored him for finding the Holy Grail - one doesn't want to poke fun at the band's breakthrough. Even in its hokiest moments, it packs a punch.

But by the time of ``The Unforgettable Fire,'' there was no need to be so glum. Blame it on the times, I suppose - but can you do that when their contemporaries were also out to save the world without being so humorless?

It all reaches a boiling point during the band's ``Joshua Tree'' era, when winning a battle against the Los Angeles Police Department to lip-sync ``Where the Streets Have No Name'' atop a liquor store apparently meant something, when walking around Las Vegas singing ``I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'' was the apex of irony, and when the band began exhuming Americana for piffle like ``Angel of Harlem.''

I realize that this should be seen as a phase marker - goodbye to the old U2, hello to the new, sleeker, hipster model. But I see only two good videos here: ``New Year's Day,'' which is sullen but artful, and ``Sweetest Thing,'' which is self-mockingly hilarious.

And that's the point: Much of U2 in the '80s has worn about as well as Joan Baez's finest political ranting, which is to say that it can still move you emotionally, but it's hopelessly trapped in time. U2 became a band for the ages when it made ``Achtung Baby.'' That its videos have improved remarkably from that point on is testament to it.

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Photo: ``The Best of U2 1980-1990'' collects many of the Irish group's earlier videos, from ``I Will Follow'' to ``Sweetest Thing.''