PHUTATORIUS
"White Wedding," "Rebel Yell," "Dancing with Myself." Which one carries Billy Idol's signature music video Moment? If you've got half a brain, you'll pick "Dancing with Myself," because I put it last — a strategy that enables me to consider and dismiss the other two quality vids, then bring this post to an electric climax. And, of course, I've gone and embedded "Myself," too. Talk about your telltale signs.
Your half a brain wins. But let's go through the motions.
More...
"White Wedding" has got it going on. There's the three goth chicks shimmying gratuitously in the shiny black outfits, the candle-and-altar set, a motorcycle crashing through a stained glass window, and "Hey, little sister, SHOTGUN." Billy slips a spiked ring on his betrothed, causing her finger to bleed (would you believe they've gone and censored that bit out of all the YouTube clips?). The bride does ballet in her new kitchen while her toaster shorts out. Thump, thump, thump-thump. That's the floor tom, but the video will have you believe someone's hammering a coffin closed. Sorry, Greg Kihn, but this is the ultimate marriage-phobic video.
Contrast "Rebel Yell" with its concept-free living. A straight-ahead, classic stage performance video with Idol and his band. There's the stick-twirling drummer, a Cyndi Lauper lookalike on the keyboards, a theatrical lead guitarist there to play Mick Ronson to Billy's Bowie. (Right now some lonely glam kid in Jersey is loading a gun. Bring it on, bitch.) Just you try watching this without pumping your fist and yelling "MORE MORE MORE!" I'm this close [indicating, with two fingers poised a smidgen of an inch apart] to cutting the fingers off my loofah bath gloves. I'll pass on the coordinated jumping-jack at the end, though. Couldn't let a good thing go, could you, Billy?
But let's talk "Dancing with Myself." This was a carry-over track from Idol's Generation X days. It's a post-apocalyptic setting, naturally, this being early MTV. The concept is pretty simple: amid several of the usual MTV non sequiturs — a husband brandishing a hammer behind his unsuspecting wife, the silhouette of a buxom girl in chains (pretty sure that's the Pistols' Steve Jones in the room with her, sharpening a razor: Jones did the guitars for this recording), a skeleton and his papier-maché animatronic friend whooping it up in a living room — a bunch of sooty extras try to climb a skyscraper, in the hope of hanging with Billy on the roofdeck. After considerable exertion these ragamuffins clamber up over the ledge, but just in time for the guitar solo, which frees up Billy to grab hold of a pair of electrical transformers and telekinetically zap them all back down a hundred stories to the ground.
This bit right here — the zapping — is unquestionably a Great Moment in Music Video. Oh, sure, Billy has just finished singing about how "if [he] had the chance, [he]'d ask the world to dance," and it seems counterintuitive that he'd turn and reject his company so emphatically. But no matter, our ragtag Sisypheans will just climb the building a second time, and Billy gives a nod to their tenacity and allows them to bust some moves right alongside him, while the song winds out. Beautiful.
Showing posts with label MTV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MTV. Show all posts
Monday, May 04, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Great Moments in Music Video: Van Halen Edition
PHUTATORIUS
Van Halen today — lest we should appear overly biased in favor of post-punk new-wave acts. An argument can be made that pretty much any video made for the 1984 album should earn its props in this department, but in this case selectivity is the mother of selection.
More...
Let's consider the candidates:
(1) "Jump." A workmanlike video performance, and nothing more. Great costuming, and there are inklings here — as in "Pretty Woman" — that the band would have fun in this medium down the road. It's notable that David Lee Roth manages to rhyme "machine" and "saying," but this achievement is an artifact of the recording, not the video. Hold for now, as there might be something better.
(2) "Panama." There, right there, at 0:44-0:53: policemen are hauling a wild-eyed Roth (or is it Lee Roth?) out of a hotel room in a bath towel and handcuffs. This narrative thread (such as it is) surfaces without warning, then drops out of the video entirely. It's a complete non sequitur, but for me, this is the Quintessence of Roth. Bath towel and handcuffs. No Spandex, no war paint, no fringed chaps: this is about possibility. It's what you didn't see — whatever happened to precipitate the arrest — that fires the imagination. This would be the Moment of Moments, but here it's just a runner-up, because of
(3) "Hot for Teacher." (see above) It all comes to a head here. Where to start? The orgasmic (!) inflections in Waldo's mother's voice, as she leaves her son for the bus? The band's woefully choreographed soft-shoe in 70s wedding tuxedos? The scaled-down school-age lookalikes? The 'Where are They Now?' segments at the end of the video (is that Rick Moranis playing Waldo the Pimp?) are fun. A lot of potential Moments here, but these are all a bit too gimmicky to take the prize. Van Halen's Great Moment in Music Video, chapter and verse — "Hot for Teacher" 1:33-1:45:
Band breaks out into full-on audio assault, black and white explodes into full color, Miss Chemistry blitzes the classroom stage in blue string bikini. Bam. That's it.
Roth is absolutely a ham (kosher, of course), and he'd overindulge himself in the solo vids that followed on the heels of 1984. "California Girls" and "Just a Gigolo" were good for a few laughs, but in the end, "Hot for Teacher" wasn't so far off when it projected Roth as "American's Favorite T.V. Game Show Host." I'll leave it to more knowledgeable fans to assess Van Halen's overall career. But in my capacity as self-appointed authority and enthusiast of music video, I declare that the band's crowning achievement in that medium was "Hot for Teacher."
CLASS DISMISSED!
Van Halen today — lest we should appear overly biased in favor of post-punk new-wave acts. An argument can be made that pretty much any video made for the 1984 album should earn its props in this department, but in this case selectivity is the mother of selection.
More...
Let's consider the candidates:
(1) "Jump." A workmanlike video performance, and nothing more. Great costuming, and there are inklings here — as in "Pretty Woman" — that the band would have fun in this medium down the road. It's notable that David Lee Roth manages to rhyme "machine" and "saying," but this achievement is an artifact of the recording, not the video. Hold for now, as there might be something better.
(2) "Panama." There, right there, at 0:44-0:53: policemen are hauling a wild-eyed Roth (or is it Lee Roth?) out of a hotel room in a bath towel and handcuffs. This narrative thread (such as it is) surfaces without warning, then drops out of the video entirely. It's a complete non sequitur, but for me, this is the Quintessence of Roth. Bath towel and handcuffs. No Spandex, no war paint, no fringed chaps: this is about possibility. It's what you didn't see — whatever happened to precipitate the arrest — that fires the imagination. This would be the Moment of Moments, but here it's just a runner-up, because of
(3) "Hot for Teacher." (see above) It all comes to a head here. Where to start? The orgasmic (!) inflections in Waldo's mother's voice, as she leaves her son for the bus? The band's woefully choreographed soft-shoe in 70s wedding tuxedos? The scaled-down school-age lookalikes? The 'Where are They Now?' segments at the end of the video (is that Rick Moranis playing Waldo the Pimp?) are fun. A lot of potential Moments here, but these are all a bit too gimmicky to take the prize. Van Halen's Great Moment in Music Video, chapter and verse — "Hot for Teacher" 1:33-1:45:
"Wait a second man — what do you think the teacher's gonna look like this year? WHOA!"
Band breaks out into full-on audio assault, black and white explodes into full color, Miss Chemistry blitzes the classroom stage in blue string bikini. Bam. That's it.
Roth is absolutely a ham (kosher, of course), and he'd overindulge himself in the solo vids that followed on the heels of 1984. "California Girls" and "Just a Gigolo" were good for a few laughs, but in the end, "Hot for Teacher" wasn't so far off when it projected Roth as "American's Favorite T.V. Game Show Host." I'll leave it to more knowledgeable fans to assess Van Halen's overall career. But in my capacity as self-appointed authority and enthusiast of music video, I declare that the band's crowning achievement in that medium was "Hot for Teacher."
CLASS DISMISSED!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Great (and Lame) Moments in Music Video; Some Thoughts on Duran Duran
PHUTATORIUS
Thank you, VH1 Classic — and you, too, TiVo, for the time-shifting — for serving up All-Time Top Ten's Duran Duran episode two nights ago. This is the province of the 35-year-old father of two: he's home on a Saturday night in front of the TV, and if he's lucky, he's found some nostalgia channel through which he might relive his youth. Shoot — VH1 has even arranged for the release of Original Six Veejay Mark Goodman from his climate-controlled storage facility to host the show.
And so, Duran Duran. My sister and I talked on the phone while I watched this — she was supporting "Hungry like the Wolf" for the #1 spot, whereas I favored "Rio." "Rio" won, but I'm not one for point-scoring. VH1 served up some terrific Double Duran nostalgia on the way up the ladder to The Song I Picked and My Sister Didn't. Some highlights:
More...
*Though it never occurred to me at the time, the video for "Wild Boys" was obviously a Road Warrior ripoff — they even dressed Simon LeBon up as Mad Max. That said, this one was clearly a costly, complicated undertaking, and I think the bit where Simon LeBon is strapped to the windmill that periodically turns him underwater, then past an open flame, has to qualify as a Great Music Video Moment.
*Likewise in "Hungry like the Wolf," when LeBon stands up in the café and throws the table over. "They show it twice," My HLTW-loving sister recalled to me over the phone, without the benefit of the programming in front of her. "It's so good they show it twice." Another Moment, surely. I remember a Saturday morning in Columbus, just before a Buckeyes game, when a friend of mine ended a heated game of euchre by throwing the kitchen table over. This might have started a fight, had he not rationalized away his rash action by declaring it was something he'd always wanted to do, since he saw it in "Hungry like the Wolf." This was an acceptable excuse. Some of us even admired the guy for it.
But the winner here is "Rio," and so it's the one we'll embed in the post.
"Rio" probably best captures what is so "on one hand/on the other" maddening about Duran Duran. Consider the head-on shot of the band on the yacht at 1:04. Few segments of music video are as simple and iconic. A shame, then, that this footage had to follow on the heels of that godawful bit where a crab clamps its claw down on one Duraner's toe.
In the end, I don't know what to make of Duran Duran. So many of these once-laughingstock early 80s bands have been rehabilitated in recent years. Indeed, some — like Bow Wow Wow — I will fight to the death to defend. Others simply retained their cool, perhaps because they weren't 100% made and destroyed by music video — they had street cred, and they only used MTV to take that last, awkward step into living rooms in the Midwest. Not so Duran Duran: video didn't supplement the band's career — it was an integral part of it. And maybe this is why I haven't made a priority of listening to them, even as I've gone through Adam Ant phases and Psych Furs phases and God knows what else: just listening to Duran Duran doesn't give you the complete picture.
It doesn't help that MTV itself has gone into the shitter over the past fifteen years. If you're going to put Duran Duran into the category of bands that flourished principally because of video, it's hard not to condemn them for the sins of the network, years later. It's hard not to see them as more Britney than Bow Wow Wow. It's not a fair knock, this guilt by MTV-association. But it's a knock that sticks.
Watch the videos. See if they don't deserve more credit than they get — and then see if you don't flinch at the prospect of personally extending them that credit. That's about where I am on Duran Duran.
Thank you, VH1 Classic — and you, too, TiVo, for the time-shifting — for serving up All-Time Top Ten's Duran Duran episode two nights ago. This is the province of the 35-year-old father of two: he's home on a Saturday night in front of the TV, and if he's lucky, he's found some nostalgia channel through which he might relive his youth. Shoot — VH1 has even arranged for the release of Original Six Veejay Mark Goodman from his climate-controlled storage facility to host the show.
And so, Duran Duran. My sister and I talked on the phone while I watched this — she was supporting "Hungry like the Wolf" for the #1 spot, whereas I favored "Rio." "Rio" won, but I'm not one for point-scoring. VH1 served up some terrific Double Duran nostalgia on the way up the ladder to The Song I Picked and My Sister Didn't. Some highlights:
More...
*Though it never occurred to me at the time, the video for "Wild Boys" was obviously a Road Warrior ripoff — they even dressed Simon LeBon up as Mad Max. That said, this one was clearly a costly, complicated undertaking, and I think the bit where Simon LeBon is strapped to the windmill that periodically turns him underwater, then past an open flame, has to qualify as a Great Music Video Moment.
*Likewise in "Hungry like the Wolf," when LeBon stands up in the café and throws the table over. "They show it twice," My HLTW-loving sister recalled to me over the phone, without the benefit of the programming in front of her. "It's so good they show it twice." Another Moment, surely. I remember a Saturday morning in Columbus, just before a Buckeyes game, when a friend of mine ended a heated game of euchre by throwing the kitchen table over. This might have started a fight, had he not rationalized away his rash action by declaring it was something he'd always wanted to do, since he saw it in "Hungry like the Wolf." This was an acceptable excuse. Some of us even admired the guy for it.
But the winner here is "Rio," and so it's the one we'll embed in the post.
"Rio" probably best captures what is so "on one hand/on the other" maddening about Duran Duran. Consider the head-on shot of the band on the yacht at 1:04. Few segments of music video are as simple and iconic. A shame, then, that this footage had to follow on the heels of that godawful bit where a crab clamps its claw down on one Duraner's toe.
In the end, I don't know what to make of Duran Duran. So many of these once-laughingstock early 80s bands have been rehabilitated in recent years. Indeed, some — like Bow Wow Wow — I will fight to the death to defend. Others simply retained their cool, perhaps because they weren't 100% made and destroyed by music video — they had street cred, and they only used MTV to take that last, awkward step into living rooms in the Midwest. Not so Duran Duran: video didn't supplement the band's career — it was an integral part of it. And maybe this is why I haven't made a priority of listening to them, even as I've gone through Adam Ant phases and Psych Furs phases and God knows what else: just listening to Duran Duran doesn't give you the complete picture.
It doesn't help that MTV itself has gone into the shitter over the past fifteen years. If you're going to put Duran Duran into the category of bands that flourished principally because of video, it's hard not to condemn them for the sins of the network, years later. It's hard not to see them as more Britney than Bow Wow Wow. It's not a fair knock, this guilt by MTV-association. But it's a knock that sticks.
Watch the videos. See if they don't deserve more credit than they get — and then see if you don't flinch at the prospect of personally extending them that credit. That's about where I am on Duran Duran.
MITHRIDATES
I have Duran^2 Rio on vinyl. That's right, English major, "Duran Duran" is not "Double Duran", it's "Duran Squared". Didn't they teach you any math in public school?
But to the point. Without the video, "Hungry Like the Wolf" is hands down the superior song. It's no contest at all. The moaning at the end is priceless.
And VH1 is internally inconsistent on the matter. On their 100 Greatest Videos list, Hungry Like the Wolf comes in at #31; Rio at #60. So score a point for Big Sister.
Gotta love these guys, though. From the Hungry Like the Wolf Wikipedia article:According to the band, the Burger King company has repeatedly asked to use the song in its advertising since the year it came out, but Duran Duran has consistently refused.
PHUTATORIUS
Yes — I'd like to see VH1 pull itself together and show some consistency here. Their All-Time Top Ten "80s videos" episode included Hungry like the Wolf, which came in at #3 in the Duran Duran-only episode an hour earlier. By rights there should have been two other Duran Duran videos in the Top Ten. They need someone like Deloitte & Touche to certify these rankings.
I always thought Pizza Hut should have paid off Depeche Mode for the rights to lay down a "Your own . . . personal . . . pizza" vocal over "Personal Jesus." Never happened, though — and I can't imagine it was a question of "selling out." Think of all the heroin David Gahan could have bought with that money.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Great Moments in Music Video
PHUTATORIUS
Start the video, now wait for it . . . wait for it . . .
THERE.
RIGHT THERE.
At 3:38.
Best Moment in the History of Music Video? I'm open to persuasion, but right now I can't think of any better.
It's this sort of thing that justifies MTV's existence. The rest of it — all the crap: Singled Out, Road Rules, Adam Curry, TRL, whatever they're doing nowadays instead of playing videos — it's well worth it, just to have moments like this.
Start the video, now wait for it . . . wait for it . . .
THERE.
RIGHT THERE.
At 3:38.
Best Moment in the History of Music Video? I'm open to persuasion, but right now I can't think of any better.
It's this sort of thing that justifies MTV's existence. The rest of it — all the crap: Singled Out, Road Rules, Adam Curry, TRL, whatever they're doing nowadays instead of playing videos — it's well worth it, just to have moments like this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)