Christmas in Hollis is one of the most famous Christmas rap songs, though it nearly didn’t happen. When Bill Adler first approached Run-DMC and asked them to contribute to the holiday compilation album, A Very Special Christmas, the band turned him down. It wasn’t until Adler suggested the title Christmas in Hollis that the band changed their mind.
All of the proceeds of A Very Special Christmas went to support the Special Olympics. (Other contributors included Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Eurythmics, U2, and Pertenders.) Christmas In Hollis was the only original composition to appear on the album and it has gone on to become a holiday mainstay.
Hollis, of course, refers to the neighborhood of Hollis, Queens, where the members of Run-DMC grew up.
This video was named the “Best Video of 1987” by Rolling Stone Magazine.
22 years ago, the world, or at least the part of the world that was watching Seinfeld at the time, learned about Festivus, the joyous holiday created by Frank Constanza. What many people did not realize at the time was that Festivus was a real holiday, albeit one celebrated by only one family. The writer of the episode and the man usually credited with creating Festivus, Dan O’Keefe, first celebrated Festivus in 1966. It was a holiday created by his father, the journalist Daniel O’Keefe and it was initially meant to celebrate the elder O’Keefe’s first date with his future wife, Deborah.
Of course, in the world of Seinfeld, it was created to celebrate Frank Costanza beating up another Christmas shopper.
Regardless of why you’re celebrating today, a Happy Festivus to all!
In 1985, After The Fire was a minor hit for The Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey. It appeared on Daltrey’s sixth solo album, Under A Raging Moon, and it was helped, on its way up the charts, by a music video that was put into heavy rotation on MTV.
After The Fire was written by Pete Townshend and it was originally meant to be a Who song. The plan was originally to debut After The Fire at Live Aid but, because of a scheduling mishap, the band did not get a chance to rehearse the new song before performing and so After The Fire was dropped from the band’s set list. It was instead given to Daltrey, who included it on his solo album.
This is perhaps the only song to name drop both Dom DeLuise and Matt Dillon. Judging from the lyrics about Dillon riding “his brother’s motorcycle” in black-and-white, the lyrics were probably referring to his performance in Rumble Fish. The reference to Dom DeLuise is a little more cryptic. Was Pete Townshend a fan of The Cannonball Run? Or was he watching The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas while writing the song? We may never know.
It’s a crime that more people don’t know the name of David Johansen. The former lead singer of the New York Dolls, Johansen has one of the best voices around and he is unique in that there is not a single genre of music that he has not been able to master. Of course, Johasen is often cited as one of the earliest punk rockers but he has gone on to perform everything from claypso to lounge to country music. Johansen has performed under many names, the best known of which is probably Buster Poindexter. It was as Buster Poindexter that he recorded his highest-charting song, Hot Hot Hot, a song that Johansen has called “the bane of my existence,” because of it’s continued popularity.
This music video features Johansen at his best. Recorded during his solo period, the Animals Medley features three songs from The Animals: We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Don’t Bring Me Down, and It’s My Life.
In 1993, Jon Bon Jovi wrote a song called Always for the soundtrack of a movie called Romeo is Bleeding. However, after Bon Jovi saw a rough cut of the film, he decided that the film was not worthy of his music so he declined to allow Always to be played over scenes of Lena Olin and Gary Oldman shooting guns at each other.
Instead, Bon Jovi recorded and released the song on their next album, Cross Road. And rather than allowing the song to appear in a bad feature film, they instead decided to feature it an even worse music video.
The video features Jack Noseworthy (who was very briefly a semi-big deal in the 90s) as a young man who is so stupid that he can’t just be happy having the amazingly sexy Carla Gugino as his girlfriend. He also decided to cheat on her with Keri Russell, who is either Carla’s roommate or maybe her kid sister. Either way, it was a pretty stupid move on Jack Noseworthy’s part. Carla runs out of the apartment and meets Jason Wiles, an artist who paints a terrible portrait of her. For some reason, Carla then calls up Jack and invites him to the the apartment. When Jack starts to look at the painting, Carla tries to stop him. (So why did you call him in the first place, Carla?) Jack sees the painting, gets upset, stabs the canvas, and then somehow makes the apartment explode. Later, Jack thinks that he sees Carla standing in his bedroom but it turns out that it’s just his imagination. Questions abound like, How did Jack blow up that apartment? Why would two incredibly attractive women settle for Jack Noseworthy? Where did the painter disappear to? Those questions go forever unanswered.
In the United Kingdom, Always was the very first number-one single on the UK Rock and Metal Singles Chart, which just goes to show you the sad state of metal in 1994.
Cardiac Arrest is one of Madness’s more serious songs, though it retains their signature sound. The lyrics are about a man who literally works himself to death, having a heart attack while he’s on the way to his job. The video features Chas Smith playing the man who has the heat attack while the other members of the band encourage him to not work so hard and to take time to actually enjoy life.
Smith not only stars in the video but he also wrote the song. The song was actually based on his father, who had suffered from repeated heart attacks at the time that the lyrics were composed. Hence, in the video, Smith is almost playing his own father.
Perhaps because of the subject matter, Cardiac Arrest was a rare non-hit for Madness. The song was also banned by BBC Radio 1 because it was felt that the lyrics were too disturbing.
Rather than telling you to “enjoy,” I’ll just suggest taking the song and video’s message to heart.
“I don’t know what this song is about. When I was writing this I was going through a divorce. And the only thing I can say about it is that it’s obviously in anger. It’s the angry side, or the bitter side of a separation. So what makes it even more comical is when I hear these stories which started many years ago, particularly in America, of someone come up to me and say, “Did you really see someone drowning?” I said, “No, wrong”. And then every time I go back to America the story gets Chinese whispers, it gets more and more elaborate. It’s so frustrating, ’cause this is one song out of all the songs probably that I’ve ever written that I really don’t know what it’s about, you know?”
— Phil Collins, on In The Air Tonight
I was thinking about Phil Collins last week.
I was visiting some members of my family in London and, on Thursday night, I was watching as the results of the general election came in. After spending the past few days worrying that Jeremy Corbyn might actually somehow weasel his way into power, I was very happy to see the results of the exit poll, which indicated that Corbyn’s Labour Party was going to lose in a landslide. As I watched the results come in and as Labour lost seat after seat, I found myself thinking about Phil Collins.
Phil Collins has a reputation for being a supporter of the Tories, though he’s often said that he’s not. This is because he let the UK after Tony Blair was initially elected. Collins said that he was living in Switzerland because that’s where his girlfriend lived but many others accused him of being a tax exile. During the 2005 election, Oasis’s Liam Gallagher famously quipped that everyone should vote Labour because, otherwise, Phil Collins might return home. Everyone had a good laugh, except for Phil who is notoriously thin-skinned about such things. Last Thursday, as I watched Boris Johnson give his victory speech with Elmo, Count Binface, and Lord Buckethead standing behind him, I asked myself, “Can Phil Collins come home now?”
(Which was a stupid think to ask since it’s been nearly ten years since the UK last had a Labour government and I’m fairly certain that Phil Collins has already come home. Chalk it up to the emotion of the moment. After spending a week being yelled at by angry Corbynites, watching them go down in defeat was a moment of such personal gratification that I was perhaps allowed to ask myself one silly question.)
Phil Collins may be thin-skinned but perhaps he’s earned the right to be. For all the ridicule that has been directed his way over the years, Phil Collins’s songs have, for better or worse, defined an era and many of them hold up far better than is usually acknowledged. Take, for instance, In The Air Tonight. Today’s music video of the day is not only one of the ultimate songs of the 80s but it’s also a song that has been sampled by a countless number of other artists.
It’s also a song that’s been the subject of many rumors. The most popular one is that Phil Collins wrote it after witnessing a man drowning. The legend goes that Collins was too far away to save the man but that someone else was close by but declined to help. Collins wrote the song to call out the callousness of the person who declined to help and, so the story goes, used to reveal the person’s name during his concerts. Much like the idea of Phil Collins hiding out in Switzerland because he didn’t want to pay his taxes, it’s a good story but it’s also not true. Collins has said that he has no idea what the song is about, beyond that he was in a dark place emotionally when he wrote it.
The song’s rapid progress up the charts was undoubtedly helped by the music video above. During the early days of MTV, this video was part of the regular rotation. Director Stuart Orme went on to direct several other videos for both Collins and Genesis, though In The Air Tonight remains his best work.
As with so many of R.E.M.’s songs, the meaning of Crush With Eyeliner is open to interpretation.
Courtney Love, for instance, has sworn that this song was about her. Michael Stipe was friends with Kurt Cobain and took Courtney Love to the MTV Music Video Awards in 1994, after Cobain’s suicide. Love has said that both Crush With Eyeliner and County Feedback are about her.
For his part, Michael Stipe has said that the song was meant to be a tribute of sorts to the New York Dolls, with the song’s mentioning of Frankenstein meant to serve as a direct reference to the Dolls’s song of the same name. Stipe has also said that the song is also about people who take on different personalities depending on whatever situation they find themselves in at the moment. That could very well describe Dolls. Of course, it could also describe Courtney Love as well.
Crush With Eyeliner was also one of the first songs that Stipe wrote after suffering through five months of writer’s block. Stipe had sunk into a deep depression following the death of his friend, the actor River Phoenix. When it came time to record Crush With Eyeliner, Stipe brought in another friend, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, to provide backing vocals on the song.
The video was directed by Spike Jonze and features a Japanese band lip-synching to the song. Jonze is a director who needs no introduction. Jonze got his start doing pop culture-themed music videos before eventually going on to become one of the most interesting feature filmmakers around. Four years after the shooting of this video, he would marry (and later divorce) Sofia Coppola. Coppola’s Lost In Translation, which was also set in Japan, features Giovanni Ribisi playing a character who is widely thought to have been based on Jonze. Coppola, for her part, said that the character was not directly based on Jonze, though “there are elements of him there, elements of experiences.”
Though this is one of David Bowie’s most popular videos and also features one of the best performances of his often underrated acting career, the story behind it is a sad one. Bowie wrote the song from the point of view of Terry Burns, his schizophrenic half-brother who once attempted suicide by jumping out of a window. Though that attempt failed, a few years later, Terry did succeed in escaping from the mental institution where he was being held. After escaping, Terry was hit by a train and killed. Much like Bowie’s previous song, All the Madmen, Jump They Say was inspired by Terry’s life and Bowie’s own attempts to understand the source of his brother’s mental illness.
This makes the video all the more poignant as Bowie plays a businessman who comes to suspect that his colleagues are plotting against him and, in order to escape from them, ends up throwing himself from the roof of an office building. Mark Romanek directs in such a way that it’s never clear whether Bowie’s character is correct to be paranoid or if it’s all in his mind. Romanek throws in visual references to other films that dealt with the themes of paranoia and conformity, including A Clockwork Orange, Alphaville, and The Trial. Romanek has subsequently gone from being an in-demand music video director to directing films such as One Hour Photo and Never Let Me Go.
When this video was released, Bowie was going through something of a career slump. Jump They Say was a bit of a comeback for him, reaching number 9 on the UK charts.
This classic song from the early 1980s was inspired by a great deal of emotional trauma.
At the start of 1982, The Pretenders consisted of vocalist and rhythm guitarist Chrissie Hynde, lead guitarist and vocalist James Honeyman-Scott, bassist and vocalist Pete Farndon, and drummer and vocalist Martin Chambers. On June 14th, 1982, Farndon was fired from the band as a result of his drug problems. Two days later, Honeyman-Scott would die of a cocaine-induced heart attack while at his girlfriend’s apartment.
At the time of Honeyman-Scott’s death, he and Hynde were working on the song that would eventually become Back on the Chain Gang. At the time, the song was envisioned as being about Hynde’s turbulent relationship with Ray Davies of the Kinks. After Honeyman-Scott’s death, the song took on a different meaning and, instead, became about Hynde’s struggle to keep the band going even after losing two of her best friends. (Farndon, himself, would die of a drug overdose in 1983.) Hynde, who was three months pregnant when the song was first recorded, dedicated Back on the Chain Gang to Honeyman-Scott’s memory. Back on the Chain Gang went on to become The Pretenders’s biggest hit in the United States, where it was adapted as an anthem by people who probably did not know the emotional story behind the song’s composition.
The video, which was put into heavy rotation during the early days of MTV, features the two surviving original members of The Pretenders. Chrisse Hynde sings while Martin Chambers plays one of many office workers who, upon arriving at work, are briefly transformed into slaves using pickaxes to excavate ruins in the desert.
Through the Shattered Lens