Since yesterday’s music video of the day was Crockett’s Theme, it seems only appropriate that today’s music video should be for the Miami Vice Theme.
Brandon Tartikoff revolutionized television when he requested a television show about “MTV cops.” Of course, before Crockett and Tubbs could take on the Miami underworld, they needed a soundtrack that was appropriate for their pastel-and-guns lifestyle. That’s where Jan Hammer and the show’s main instrumental theme came in. When you hear that music, you know it’s all about to go down.
When Miami Vice premiered on NBC in 1984, it was an immediate hit that spawned a successful soundtrack album. As soon as the Miami Vice Theme was released as a single in August of 1985, it shot to the top of the charts. The song’s popularity kept the Miami Vice soundtrack at the top of the album charts for 11 weeks, a record that would stand until 2006, when it was broken by the High School Musical soundtrack.
The video is mostly made up of footage from the show and Jan Hammer performing but it wins some points for being edited to make it appear as if Crockett and Tubbs are attempting to arrest Hammer. Just like the show itself, this video is pure 80s, complete with a close-up of a giant floppy desk and plenty of synthesizer action.
Crockett’s Theme was originally written for the hit NBC series, Miami Vice. As evidenced by the title, it was the theme music for everyone’s favorite cop without socks, Sonny Crockett. The song was released on both the second Miami Vice soundtrack and Jan Hammer’s 1987 album, Escape From Television.
The video has nothing to do with Miami Vice. Instead, it is about a man who cannot choose between his woman and his kaleidoscope. The woman eventually makes the decision for him, not only breaking his kaleidoscope but leaving him. Luckily, Jan Hammer is in the next room, playing a keytar.
Crockett’s Theme was not a hit in the United States but found greater success in Europe. It reached number two in Ireland. More recently, it can be heard on Emotion 98.3 in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was itself heavily influenced by Miami Vice.
Tearing up Vice City while rocking out to Jan Hammer
There are many houses featured in the music video for Madness’s Our House. While the song is about the day-to-day life of the British working class, the video still offers up glimpses of the Playboy Mansion and Buckingham Palace. However, most of the video was filmed at a terrace house in northwest London.
This song is often mistakenly referred to as being a one-hit wonder. While it may be the band’s best-known and most popular song in the United States, it’s just one of the many hits that Madness had in the UK. First formed in 1976 and still together (though they did temporarily break-up for 6 years, from 1986 to 1992), Madness has had 15 singles reach the UK top ten, one UK number one single, and two numbers ones in Ireland. Over the course of the 80s, Madness spent a record 214 weeks on the UK singles charts.
This video was directed by David Robinson, who directed several other videos for Madness. He also directed videos for Robert Plant, The Belle Stars, Robert Palmer, and Tracey Ullman.
Despite the success of Wonder Woman, DC Entertainment has still struggled when it comes to crafting a compelling cinematic universe. The upcoming Joker is not an official part of the DCEU but that could change if the film is a success. An origin story, Joker features Joaquin Phoenix taking on the role of the clown prince of crime. Though it will be over a year before we see the final results, director Todd Phillips has released a teaser, showing us Phoenix in his Joker makeup.
In Stan & Ollie, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy finally get the biopic treatment, with John C. Reilly in the role of Hardy and Steve Coogan as Laurel.
Along with playing Oliver Hardy, John C. Reilly will also be returning to the role of Ralph in Ralph Breaks The Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2. The mayhem continues on November 2nd.
In The Oath, all Americans are required to sign a loyalty oath the day after Thanksgiving. A new red band trailer for this dark comedy was released this week.
In Solis, Steven Ogg plays an astronaut who is trapped on a spacecraft that is on a collision course with the sun. That’s not a good place to be.
Just in time for Halloween, Netflix will be reimagining The Haunting of Hill House as a ten-episode television series. The show drops on October 12th.
Finally, The Twilight Zone is returning once again, this time under the direction of Jordan Peele. The CBS All Access show will premiere in 2019.
The song may be about a drunk race car driver named Jerry and a retired fireman named Captain Pearson but the video is exhibit one of why nachos shouldn’t be left on the sidewalk.
Jerry Was A Race Car Driver was the second single to be release by Primus and it was their first song to receive heavy radio airplay. It eventually peaked at number 23 on 1991’s Modern Rock Tracks. Listen closely and you can hear a sample of Bill Moseley saying, “Dog will hunt!” in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
As for the video, the man buying the nachos is played by Adam Gates while the skateboarder who collides with him is Primus’s guitarist, Larry LaLonde. The performance footage was filmed at a Primus show at Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, California while the race car footage was filmed at the Petaluma speedway. As for the claymation figures in the nachos, they are all creatures who appeared on the cover of Primus’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese album.
First released in 1989, the album Dr. Feelgood became and remains Mötley Crüe’s best-selling album to date. It was also their most critically acclaimed, in no doubt due to the band’s newly found sobriety. After years of drugs, sex, and debauchery, Dr. Feelgood was Mötley Crüe’s announcement that they could still rock even if they were sober.
Ironically, for an album that was recorded sober, the title track was about drugs. Dr. Feelgood was about a Los Angeles drug dealer. Nikki Sixx, who wrote the song, later told Rolling Stone that the song was based on several different drug dealers that he had done business with. Just two years before Dr. Feelgood became a hit, Sixx had been a notorious junkie who, after a heroin overdose, was actually legally dead for two minutes before a paramedic was able to revive him with two shots of adrenaline.
Along with being a slang term for heroin, Dr. Feelgood was also the nickname of several notorious doctors. Perhaps the most infamous Dr. Feelgood was Max Jacobson, who used to give “miracle tissue regenerator” shots to the rich and famous. His clients included everyone from JFK to Marilyn Monroe to Humphrey Bogart. Robert Freyman, the physician who is though to have inspired The Beatles’s Dr. Robert, was also sometimes called Dr. Feelgood.
Dr. Feelgood became Mötley Crüe’s first and, to date, only gold single in the United States. The video follows the song’s title character as he goes from working the streets to owning a mansion. In a repeat of what happened to Tony Montana, Dr. Feelgood’s own hubris eventually brings him down. As for why Mötley Crüe is performing in a revival tent, it probably just looked cool.
The song spent 109 weeks on the charts after its release and it remains Mötley Crüe’s most popular single.
Captive State is the latest science fiction epic from director Rupert Wyatt. Wyatt previously proved himself with Rise of the Planet of the Apes so I am looking forward to seeing what he can do with the story of an Earth that has been taken over by aliens. Captive State will be released in March of 2019.
Harmony Korine returns to the beach with The Beach Bum. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, and Snoop Dogg, this appears to be an unexpectedly light-hearted film from the mind behind Kids, Gummo, and Spring Breakers. The Beach Bum will be released on March 22nd.
Judging from the trailer, The Boat appears to be Christine-in-the-water. The Boat will be released on September 22nd.
Finally, a legendary punk rocker struggles to stay sober in Her Smell. Judging from this teaser, it does not appear to be working.
18 and Life was based on a true story, about an 18 year-old boy who accidentally shot his best friend with a gun that he thought he was unloaded and who was given a life sentence as a result. Did the video do justice to the real-life tragedy? Let’s break it down.
0:01 — The video starts in prison, with the usual tracking shot of men smoking behind bars. Ricky is already serving his sentence, thinking about how his life got so messed up.
0:27 — At the time this song was recorded, Sebastian Bach was Skid Row’s lead singer. In 1996, Bach was fired from Skid Row when he suggested they accept the opening spot on KISS’s latest tour.
0:45 — Ricky ends up on the patio, where his best friend is waiting for him. Fortunately, Ricky has not been injured by all of that broken glass so, after saluting his father, he and his friend go off to have some fun, 80s style.
1:16 — Secret handshakes, 80s style!.
1:27 — Hanging out, 80s style!
1:31 — Setting shit on fire, 80s style!
1:39 — Breaking and entering, 80s style!
1:46 — Shooting liquor bottles in an alley, 80s style!
1:51 — Not following common sense gun safety rules, 80s style!
2:00 — Wasting your life away in prison, 80s style!
2:09 — Vandalism, 80s style!
2:18 — Ricky is Tipper Gore’s worst nightmare.
2:23 — They’re back to playing with the gun. Will these youngsters never learn?
2:34 — Is his friend begging or daring Ricky to shoot him? This part of the video is open to interpretation. In real life, the shooting happened because the gun was believed to be empty but, in this video, they’ve both been firing gun so they both know it’s loaded.
2:35 — Ricky has obviously read Watchmen, but he probably still doesn’t understand why Richard Nixon was still the president.
2:53 — Ricky shoots his only friend. But why? Ricky does not look shocked and we saw him firing the gun earlier so there is no reason to believe that Ricky, unlike the real person who inspired this song, didn’t know it was loaded. Was Ricky crazy? Was Ricky angry? Or was Ricky just stupid?
3:13 — Ricky throws his gun into the fire, which has been raging for at least two days now.
3:26 — In 2017, Sebastian Bach announced that he was having a “singing-related” hernia operation because, in his own words, he literally “sang my guts out.”
3:37 — In prison, Ricky ponders how different his life would have been if he wasn’t an idiot.
3:49 — Did anyone ever put out that fire? It looked serious.
This video was directed by Wayne Isham, who has been everyone’s go-to video director for decades. The song was Skid Row’s biggest hit and it was also the most played video on MTV in 1989.
“It’s a subtle, political thing. Michael specifically mentions the term ‘bush-whacked’. But if you want to take it like ‘Stand’, that’s cool, too. You like to think that you can appreciate these songs on any level you want to. I have a lot of records I listen to when I’m just doing the dishes. Like Ride records. I really like Ride a lot. And I have no idea what the songs are about. And I really don’t care. I don’t even worry about it. Lyrics are the last thing I listen to, unless someone is hitting me over the head with it.”
— R.E.M.’s Peter Buck on Drive
Drive may have written to encourage young people to get involved in politics and to vote but I have always thought that the video was about the dangers of crowd surfing. The video was filmed over two nights at Los Angeles’s Sepulveda Dam. According to Michael Stipe, both Oliver Stone and actor River Phoenix showed up for the filming: “Oliver had been drinking and they got into a fight in my trailer. It was fun to watch. And it kind of fueled the energy that this video, from beginning to end, kind of carries through it.”
This video was one of several videos that Peter Care directed for R.E.M. Care also directed videos for Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Depeche Mode, and Fine Young Cannibals. Care has also directed one feature film, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.
Supposedly, Adam Scott is an extra in the video. I have yet to spot him.
Not even Beck seems to be sure. According to Songfacts, Beck has offered up several different interpretations. He’s said that the song was an updated version of the American folk song, Stagger Lee:
“I don’t know if I ever HAD any youthful purity, but I can understand that you might be tempted to make commercial shit and compromise to do it. I try not to compromise on anything. I think we associate becoming an adult with compromise. Maybe that’s what the devil is. In ‘Devils Haircut’ that was the scenario. I imagined Stagger Lee… I thought, what if this guy showed up now in 1996. The song had this ’60s grooviness, and I thought of using him as a Rumplestiltskin figure, this Lazarus figure to comment on where we’ve ended up as people. What would he make of materialism and greed and ideals of beauty and perfection? His reaction would be, ‘Whoa, this is disturbing shit.'”
He’s also said that the song is simply about the evil of vanity (literally a devil’s haircut) or a song about being on tour (hence, the briefcase blues). Beck has also said that, while writing the song, he thought that “Devil’s haircut was a really bad lyric. If I can’t finish a song, I’ll just put in something temporary. That’s what ‘Loser’ was. Then the temporary one always becomes the best one, because it wasn’t all thought out.”
As for the video, director Mark Romanek claims that it was inspired by both Midnight Cowboy and The 400 Blows. Beck, wandering through New York City with his cowboy hat and his radio, was meant to be a modern-day Joe Buck while the freeze frames were inspired by the end of Truffaut’s portrait of alienated youth.
Two of the videos most memorable moments were accidental. When the car nearly runs over Beck, it is meant to recall the “I’m walking here!” scene from Midnight Cowboy but the car’s driver didn’t hit the brakes soon enough and Beck was actually hit by the car and injured his leg as a result. The other unplanned scene was when the pigeons took flight just as Beck approached them.
The video for Devil’s Haircut would go on to win two MTV Music Video Awards, one for Best Editing and one for Best Male Video.
Through the Shattered Lens 