This Korg Poly-61 kills fascists! New wavers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your oversized shoulder pads!
Re-Flex - The Politics of Dancing (from The Politics of Dancing, 1983) - Are you now doing, or have you ever done, the hokey-pokey? I have in my hand a list of 57 highly-placed individuals who have put their left feet in and shaken them all about.
Duran Duran - New Moon on Monday (from Seven and the Ragged Tiger, 1983) - So the moral of the video is that the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring in late 1960's Czechoslovakia would have succeeded if the pro-democracy forces had access to Simon Le Bon's pouty lips and Nick Rhodes's groovy hair?*
*Providing that the counterrevolutionary forces were armed with neon vibrators and not Kalashnikovs and Soviet tanks, of course.
If there's one lesson I need to learn, it's that the personal complacency that serves me well on so many occasions should not be applied to matters related to dental care. It's not as if I wasn't clued onto that in a big way three months ago, but some habits are harder to break than others.
While I do my best to shoulder my current self-made cross of avoidable stupidity, here are a few things that possess the ability to make me forget the pain, if only for a few short moments...
Such is the cheertopian power of Bring It On Week that I've decided to make a second contribution to Chris Sims's celebration of all things cheertastic with a post spotlighting some music videos with a pronounced pro-pom-pom slant.
Sunday is a day of rest...and at Armagideon Time, it's also a day of lazy music video posts.
I popped my head of out my carefully-constructed bunker yesterday to try and forecast what's in store for us in the time that's coming. I saw nothing but shadows, long, dark, and ominous. All the roads lead to a single destination...
I'm taking a break today, for reasons I may or may not discuss tomorrow.
Here's something to tide you over until then:
It's been a while since my last visual synergy post. To be honest, I'd pretty much given up on the concept. Compiling the last couple of installments turned out to be kind of a chore, which undermines the intended "lazy themed music video post" rationale.
I was driving down South Border Road this morning and marvelling at the post-snowstorm landscape. The Middlesex Fells Reservation had been recast in stark, dazzling monochrome. The forest of evergreens, the ground, the granite outcrops -- all rendered in the darkest of darks and the brightest of whites set beneath the battleship gray of an overcast sky. It got me thinking, in my usually elliptical manner, of the old school music video aesthetic where performers were plunked down before a plain white (and frequently overlit) backdrop and filmed in high contrast glory.
It's a striking effect and leaves little doubt as to where the viewers focus ought to be...and there's also the fact that it's far easier on the promotional budget than group trips to Sri Lanka or multiple JetSki rentals are. Though it's not as common a practice in these days of overpolished music video productions, the visual style still does crop up here and there every so often. And why not? It's visually compelling, cheap, and serves as a perfect bit of retrological shorthand.
It's the last Friday night before Christmas. For too many people, the next three days will be a screaming tinseled nightmare of last minute shopping, travel hassles, and event planning...
...and that's exactly why it's important to take a little time to kick back, relax, and appreciate the little things that make life worth living.
The Cattanooga Cats - Sittin' by the Fireside - This cozy little bubblegum pop gem didn't appear on the cartoon felines' 1969 LP, but came from Mondo Daddykin's meticulously compiled collection of the music used in the show. (Oh, how I miss MD's blog...) The male vocals for the Cats were handled by Michael Lloyd of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (and later a superstar producer).
"It's guaranteed to make you puke." Not a statement usually used to pitch a product or experience, but twelve-year old boys are a different species entirely. The engine of induced regurgitation being referenced was the Tilt-A-Whirl, one of many lurid and potentially dangerous attractions at the annual Boys' Club carnival. (The club only sponsored the event, the administration of which was handled by those semi-nomadic purveyors of fried dough, chancy rides, and rigged games of chance colloquially known as "carny folk.")
The arrival of the carnival at the vacant lot abutting the Northeast Trade Center in North Woburn was always a time of wonder and delight, though never so much so as in the spring of 1984. Previous trips had been made under the watchful eyes and tight purse strings of parents or other adult chaperones, but having turned twelve, and thus standing at the crossroads of childhood hijinx and adolescent angst, this marked the first time my friends and I were able to attend the carnival alone and unsupervised, free of admonishments about our sugar and trans fat intakes, the no-win nature of the midway games, and our suitability for trying out the coolest and most dangerous-looking of the rides.
Even better, the fairgrounds were less than a mile from the neighborhood where we lived, well within easy biking distance. The only thing that prevented us from attending the carnival every single night it was in local residence was the lack of parental largess once we had burned up our initial stores of ready cash.
While our money lasted, though, we wandered the stalls and attractions in hopes of winning a amateurish reproduction of a Led Zeppelin or Blue Oyster Cult LP cover painted onto a sharp-edged sheet of glass (which one of the older kid's told me were for sniffing cocaine of off, making it the peaked-in-high-school set's equivalent of a gold-plated spoon) from the goldfish game, or to check out the assortment of hard-used and dated arcade machines (Joust! Berzerk!) set up in an army surplus tent on the edge of the lot overlooking the Zayre's parking lot. The carnival had a open city vibe to it, where groups of kids from different parts of the city would meet up and form temporary alliances.
It was one of the kids from the subdivided hinterlands near the Burlington line, a classmate of mine (due to Woburn's unintuitive boundaries for elementary school districts) who made the above case for the Tilt-A-Whirl's superiority vis-a-vis the Flying Bobs, the Round-Up, or the giant ferris wheel with enclosed spinnable cars. "It's guaranteed to make you puke," he said, and the unspoken challenge contained in his endorsement could not be denied. So the members of our group paired up and gave it a shot.
Rumors about that "kid from two towns over" who lost an arm in the ride aside (and those rumors were as ubiquitous to the carnival's atmosphere as the smells of frying medium and whiskey breath*), a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl doesn't really instill roller coaster levels of adrenalin-spiked terror. Functionally, the ride is only a step or two up from the kiddie merry-go-rounds featuring bright plastic race cars in place of horses, with a stiff dose of centrifugal force to add some kick.
And it's that force, acting upon a belly packed to the esophagus with junk food and soda, that produces the effect my classmate vouched for. At the ride's conclusion, my friends and I staggered off the exit gantry, and one by one proceeded to lean over and spew forth steaming primitivist murals of half-digested candy apples and popcorn onto the blank canvas of dust and trampled grass before us, all to the oohs, ahhs, and ewwws of the other kids watching. There was even a pointed critiquing session of our efforts, in which I fared rather poorly.
Lack of texture and poor spread radius. It's the story of my life, really.
Wow, that ran longer than planned. Are you ready for a music video thrill ride of thrills. excitement, and cheaply made teddy bears filled with styrofoam pellets? The management asks that you keep your arms and other appendages inside the car at all times.
Dire Straits - Tunnel of Love - The Warsaw Pact's superiority in bumper car technology was completely offset by NATO's fleet of state-of-the-art canal barges.
Depeche Mode - Get the Balance Right - Now watch as we go from moody...
Madness - House of Fun - ...to joyously goofy...
Lush - Hypocrite - ...to gloomy introspection in the course of this non-stop merry-go-round called "life."
Madness - House of Fun (from Madness, 1983)
Lush - Hypocrite (from Split, 1994)
* Maura, who did grow up two towns over from Woburn, says that there was a bona fide carnival-related mutilation back in the day, which could very well be the ur-text from which the stories sprung.
My webhost is having issues, so today's official post will have to wait until things get straightened out. In the meantime, here's Lene Lovich being Lene Lovich in the video for "It's You, Only You." This was one of "our" songs my wife and had played at our wedding reception.
Wait, there's a war going on in Iraq? I was too busy watching Bill O'Reilly discuss the cultural significance of "Firecrotch." This a brave new age of journalism, brothers and sisters! Deboned, defanged, and with record levels of cross-promotion! Why not segue from a report on new prosthetics for war amputees, complete with footage of the new Bionic Woman series, to a Big Pharma-sponsored health report on the dangers of EEBPS -- Excessive Eye Booger Production Syndrome -- and how you can ask your doctor about Sleepiseedimox to cure it? (Side effects may include diarrhea, eye rot, or excessive production of eye boogers.)
Others may lament this sorry state of affairs, but not I. I get my news from music videos.
Ice T - Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous - "Mr. Ice? What was it like working with Judd Nelson and Richard Belzer? Do you still have 'your twelve gauge sawed off'? Any word of a Body Count reunion tour?"
The Tubes - Talk To Ya Later - Suddenly I'm feeling a strange urge to fire up the Atari 2600 and play some Megamania.
Don Johnson - Heartbeat - Here we see an actor pretending to be a musician pretending to be a reporter pretending that The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart never happened.
Adam Ant - Goody Two Shoes - A music video classic featuring the familiar (and portentously tragic) Antean theme of persecution, as well as an appearance by Bond Girl/scream queen Caroline Munro as the female reporter sporting the insanely huge pair of spectacles.
Naked Eyes - Always Something There to Remind Me - "Switched on Bacharach" or "Soft Cell minus the sleaze," if you will.
For me, this song is a most potent nostalgia-inducing totem, its synthesized bell peals are capable of evoking a flood of half forgotten childhood memories, including the location of the AT-AT Driver action figure I misplaced when I was eleven. I'd stop by North Woburn and retrieve the poor thing, but the tree stump I hid it under has been cleared away to make room for a massive subdivision.
Naked Eyes - Always Something There to Remind Me (from Burning Bridges, 1983; also available on The Best of Naked Eyes, 1991)
I remember riding my bike down Forest Park Road in the spring of 1985, and finding a massive bundle of issues of Circus and Hit Parader put out with someone’s trash. It seemed like a fantastic score, until I had lugged the stack home and began to actually read the magazines. The band profiles, reviews, and whatnot seemed so utterly calculated, even to my thirteen year old self, to exploit the frustrations and yearnings of blue collar teenage boys. Dee’s dad wanted him to attend the voc-tech to earn a plumbing apprenticeship – but Dee wanted TO ROCK!
Confronted with the Tiger Beat-dressed-in-studded-wristband reality, my rockitude went into dormancy for almost half a decade, until it was briefly resuscitated by thrash metal’s promise of being the real, dangerous deal. Alas, it was a promise better fulfilled by punk rock, which, despite its own set of intrinsic paradoxes, placed a greater emphasis on outrage and sentiment than on the hollow artistic wizardry of the power ballad or the eight minute guitar solo. Metal’s confusion between technical proficiency and musical greatness is not far removed from the pop music notion that a great singer is someone who can hold a note through an entire Minnesota winter. The American Idol concept of greatness holds no place for Tom Waits.
My rocky relationship with the genre aside, I have a certain fascination with heavy metal culture, in so far as it clearly articulates a particular and common enough strain of adolescent maleness. The key word here is “adolescent.” In recent years, there has been a trend among critics, comedians, and other evangelists of the popcult zeitgeist towards redeeming and ennobling the concept of RAWK and metal, either as a facile camp touchstone or in a celebratory, unironic sense.
The former are easily enough understood, as there is no retro artifact so unassuming that it cannot be dusted off, polished, and sold at a premium to the self-consciously hip. The latter, however, apart from a handful of old fans who didn’t stop believing (Whoa-oh-oh!), seem to be of the arrested development school of contemporary masculinity where “manhood” is a chimera formed from equal parts teenager, frat boy, and film/game/music geek. Is that hypocritical, coming from a man creeping towards age forty who dwells in a state of retrological limbo? Maybe, but as I’ve said whenever friends bring up the notion of “wanting to go back,” if the passing of years has done nothing else for me, it has given me a sense of perspective and cleared any illusions that personal tastes equal inherent quality. There is a world of difference between deciding what to hold on to, and refusing to let go.
Wow, that was a long introduction to a lazy music video post, but sometimes one must follow where one’s muse leads them. Continuing the last week’s Apocalypse Rock theme, here are some pinnacles of the music video art form, heavy metal concept video subcategory, post-apocalypse silliness subset:
Krokus - Screaming in the Night - "Krokus," because Iris, Delphinium, and Portulaca were already taken.
Queensryche - Queen of the Reich - I think this sums up my assertions about the genre and its target demographic pretty well. Listen close you can hear the rolling of polyhedral dice and the crack of the Rifts manual's spine in the background.
Grim Reaper - Fear No Evil - While the song lacks the magnificent bombast and oh-so-quotable title line of the band's earlier "See You in Hell," the video more than makes up for it.
Honestly, though, if I want to watch art-directed, fyoo-cha-riss-tik music video excess, I'd go with this simultaneously ahead of its time and hoplessly dated gem:
Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 - A testament to the power of one good gimmick, mesh fabric, and super-hold hairspray.
Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 (from Flaunt It!, 1986) - Maura hates it. I love it. What more do you need to know?
We're not about to let a trivial thing like nuclear Armageddon keep us from rocking, are we?
Deep Purple - Knocking at Your Back Door - I want to be an archaeologist.
Rick Springfield - Human Touch - Along with with rats and roaches, we'll have to add "embarrassing dance routines" to the list of things capable of surviving an atomic holocaust.
I have used that "feigning to stumble" trick on several occasions to get into a hot chick's cyro-pod. It works every time.
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - You Got Lucky - I've never been much of a Tom Petty fan. I remember my metalhead coworkers at the hospital going ga-ga for Full Moon Fever while I was discovering the joys of Entertainment! (which they classily deemed as "tuneless art-fag crap"). Negative personal associations and my apathy for his music aside, Petty did put out some pretty interesting music videos back in the day.
INXS - Listen Like Thieves - Well, if one band was going to survive the Bomb, one could do worse than INXS. Tragically, singer Michael Hutchence didn't even manage to outlast the 1990's, much less the obliteration of civilization as we know it.
INXS - Listen Like Thieves (from Listen Like Thieves, 1985) - I was aware of INXS and their string of Top 40 hits, but never really listened to the band until I started dating Maura and bought their entire back catalogue (at the time, which was 1992) from a used record shop at the reasonable price of 99 cents per LP. I won't pretend that their material is high art, but I've grown to appreciate their infectiously listenable pop/arena rock sound.
...and because it fits the theme, and you probably would never come across it otherwise:
The Reactors - World War Four (from World War Four, 1980) - One of (at least) three punk bands who went under that moniker in the late 70's/early 80's, these Reactors were a female-fronted act who hailed from San Bernadino. Their LP, like a lot of punk rock obscurities from the era, has become something of a collector's item, commanding prices vastly out of proportion to its aesthetic value. Don't get me wrong; I think it's swell, but not worth missing a mortgage payment over.
Wedding season is in full swing, so here's a music video tribute to nuptial bliss...
Nick Lowe - Cruel to Be Kind - Featuring Lowe's then-wife (country singer and Johnny Cash's step-daughter, Carlene Carter) and his Rockpile bandmates.
Billy Idol - White Wedding - Featuring Idol's then-partner Perri Lister, an exploding toaster, and asses shrinkwrapped in black latex.
The Greg Kihn Band - Jeopardy - She seemed like such a catch -- from old Innsmouth stock, dual master's degrees in marine biology and comparative religion, an Olympic level swimmer -- and then she took you to meet her family...
Pet Shop Boys - Heart - So Gandalf is not only the mutant master of magnetism, he's also a vampire? The fanfic/slashfic potential is staggering.
Pet Shop Boys - Heart (from Actually, 1987) - Whenever I listen to or post something by Pet Shop Boys, I feel the disembodied head of Kevin Church peering down over my left shoulder. One out of three times, it's just my overactive imagination at work.
Is "doing stuff for Africa" still the celebrity cause du jour? I ask because I had to close my eyes for a second, and in that space of time the beautiful people might have moved on to another subject of fashionable activism...like stopping cat juggling. Speaking out about starving kids, ethnic strife, and the other trappings of colonialism's putrid legacy is fine and all, but it's important to stay current in one's shallow efforts at advocacy. Darfur may be the new Tibet, but when even lampreys on the underbelly of celebrity culture like K-Fed mention an interest in the cause, it's time to seeks something a little more now. The slum clearances in Mumbai look rather promising in this regard, I'm told.
It makes me long for a simpler time of superficial dabbling in fashionable causes, when all it took to stroke one's ego save the world was a really shitty pop song and spot-the-famous-person music video. The Brits kicked off the trend with the not-terrible Band Aid track "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in 1984, the brainchild of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, produced by the then-ubiquitous Trevor Horn:
Not to be done by their cousins across the pond, a veritable pantheon of American rock and pop stars came together in 1985 to do it right, and by "right" I mean excruciatingly self-indulgent and unbearably cheesy. As Greil Marcus pointed out, it's rather...odd...how the line "It's a choice we're making" in USA For Africa's "We Are the World" echoes Pepsi's "Choice of a New Generation" ad slogan, considering the song's composers, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, just happened to be pitchmen for the beverage at the time. "We're saving our own lives" has to set a record for obliviously narcissistic toxicity levels in a pop song.
Canada then responded with its own homegrown effort, which to this day I'm still half convinced is really a hoax perpetrated by the SCTV crowd. (Martin Short as Mike Reno, John Candy as Randy Bachman, Eugene Levy as Joni Mitchell...) When the reality is Northern Lights' "Tears Are Not Enough," satire becomes redundant:
That's all well and good, but where is the type of music that would speak to Andrew circa 1985? Where is the call to compassionate action targeted towards "the kidz." specifically the ones rocking their air guitars to Out of the Cellar and making laminated pentagrams in shop class? Have no fear, Hear n' Aid has got you covered with "We're Stars." (Hey! Who invited that dude from Journey?):
Every good popcult trend needs a corresponding parody, and The Ramones ably stepped up to the plate with the video for "Something to Believe In" (Maura's favorite Ramones track), featuring a quite awesome list of "celebrity" guest appearances:
The high point of this popcult ripple? Hands down, I'd say that honor goes to Artists United Against Apartheid's "Sun City," which featured a diverse roster of musicians (including Joey Ramone and a slew of old school rappers) and senses of conviction and geopolitical awareness sorely lacking in the other efforts. Keep an eye out for "possessed by the Devil" Bono (Maura's description, not mine):
Artists United Against Apartheid - Sun City (from Sun City, 1985) - How times have changed since then. Nelson Mandela has been freed, apartheid is no more, and a stay at the Sun City resort was the grand prize on the last season of Celebrity Fit Club.
I'm feeling a bit wiped today, so instead of a real post, here are a few music videos from Lush, a perennial Armagideon Time favorite.
Men Without Hats - The Safety Dance - Having gotten their synthpop groove on, the merry residents of Summerisle then proceeded to the shoreline to sacrifice Sergeant Howie to their heathen gods.
Adam & The Ants - Ant Rap - "It was incredibly stupid, yet we danced to it." - Maura, Queen of Animals and lapsed Antperson
Real Life - Send Me an Angel - When Chewbacca met that one gal who works at Hot Topic and insists her name is "Countess Natasha" even though her name tag says "Bernice." Also: Check out Little Lord Fauntelroy on keyboards.
Real Life - Send Me an Angel (from Heartland, 1983; also available on New Wave Hits of the 80's, Volume 11, 1995) - I mock, but I do happen to like this bit of Aussie new wave. I could have done without that odd rock riff near the end, though.
According to Wikipedia (which I admit carries the same weight as "according to that street person who rants about Perry Como and black helicopters"), there have been no fewer than seventeen versions of this song released by the band in the past quarter-century. My personal favorite is the 12" kazoo and helium extended dance mix given away as an incentive for prospective Betamax machine buyers. It edged out the Macarena Fiesta dub mix by the slimmest of margins.
A neat visual gimmick? A statement about the artificiality and superficiality of modern pop music? The basis for this week's lazy music video post?
a-ha - Take on Me - The cartoon bits are what everyone remembers, but few people realize that the live action sequences were filmed using a then-experimental process known as Mentos-Vision.
Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood - Other bands may dabble with the whole cartoon thing, but the Gorillaz took it all the way. I really, really want a hand puppet of the rapping ghost from this video. Anyone want to make one for me?
Bloc Party - Helicopter - I get odd flashes of déjà vu whenever I listen to modern indie pop bands. It's not flashes of historical awareness (like being able to detect traces of Roxy Music in Duran Duran's "Hungry like the Wolf") or obvious sources of inspiration (like with Marsheaux and the Human League and OMD), but rather a feeling of false nostalgia, that I've heard these songs before, but can't place where.
ABC - (How to Be a) Millionaire - I can't get past how much animated Martin Fry looks like my brother in this video. All that's missing are a pair of spectacles and a Captain America t-shirt.
ABC - (How to Be a) Millionaire (from How to Be a...Zillionaire!, 1985) - Such a perfect embodiment of an era in musical form, made even more entertaining by the way my brain overlays Eddie Murphy's "You've got no ice cream, 'cause your on welfare" on top of the "I've seen the future/I can't afford it" parts. Given the choice, though, I'd rather listen to the band's more substantial Lexicon of Love LP.
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