I believe this is the first music video to be released by The Smile, a side project for three members of Radiohead.
This video was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Based on this video, it looks like Anderson could have quite a career as a filmmaker if he chooses to pursue one.
Enjoy!
Yesterday, the video was bad.
Today, it’s fat.
This video was shot on the same set where the video for Bad was filmed. Weird Al had to get permission for Michael Jackson to use the set and Jackson granted it. Jackson appreciated almost all of Weird Al’s parodies, though he did ask Weird Al not to do a parody of Black or White.
I’ve always thought Fat was the better song.
Enjoy!
I was going to pick another heavy metal video for today but then Lisa told me that today is Martin Scorsese’s birthday and I realized which video I had to pick. I was actually surprised to see that no one had ever picked Bad for music video of the day in the past. This is one of those videos that epitomized an era and it was directed by Martin Scorsese.
Here’s the long version, which was rarely played on MTV.
Here’s the shorter version for the Too Long, Didn’t Watch crowd.
You can’t fault Scorsese’s gritty direction, especially in the early black-and-white half of the video. Michael Jackson is not really convincing as someone who was ever considered to be “bad,” especially when he’s going up against Wesley Snipes, but there’s not much Scorsese could have done about that. Snipes is not the only familiar actor to appear in this video. The drug dealer is played by Paul Calderon, who played the bartender in Pulp Fiction. The voice of Michael Jackson’s mother is supplied by Roberta Flack. Cinematographer Michael Chapman and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, two regular Scorsese collaborators, also worked on this video. The script was written by novelist Richard Price.
I can’t hear this song without thinking about Weird Al Yankovic.
Enjoy!
This song appeared on X’s fourth studio album, More Fun In The New World. That was the last of X’s albums to be produced by Ray Manzarek, formerly of The Doors. This was also the band’s final album before the divorce of John Doe and Exene Cervenka. Even after splitting up and marrying other people, John and Exene continued to make wonderful music together.
This video features John and Exene singing the song while Billy Zoom plays guitar and flashes his trademark smile. X was about as positive as any punk band ever would be.
Enjoy!
The music video for Sussudio was filmed at The Princess Victoria, a London pub that, at the time, was owned by Richard Branson.
This video was directed by Jim Yukich, a frequent Collins collaborator who has basically directed videos for everyone who was anybody in the music business.
Enjoy!
The Madness was a short-lived ska band that was primarily made up for four members, lead vocalist Suggs, saxophonist Lee Thompson, guitarist Chris Foreman and vocalist Cathal Smyth. (Various guest musicians filled in one drums and bass.) As you can probably guess by the band’s lineup, The Madness was an off-shoot from the band, Madness. Madness had temporarily broken up over creative differences so the four members of the band who were still on speaking terms formed a new group by adding a “The” to their old name.
The Madness released one self-titled album, from which I Pronounce You was the first single. The song imagines the feelings of bride on the eve of her arranged marriage. At the time that this video was released, Chris Thompson described it as being a video on which the band “tried to be serious.” Of course, serious has always been a relative term when it comes to Madness.
The Madness broke up after their first album but, fortunately, all seven of the members of Madness would come back together in 1992 and the band is still going strong. Their latest album is set to be released at the end of this week.
Enjoy!
This is the video for Machinehead, which is the probably the closest that Bush actually got to recording a worthwhile song in the 90s. It still features all of the things that made Bush the worst band of the grunge era (including, but not limited to, Gavin Rossdale’s overwrought singing and his annoyingly obscure lyrics) but it also features worthwhile and hard-pounding guitar work from whoever Bush’s lead guitarist was at the time. I’m not looking it up.
The video features a lot of London, a reminder that Bush was sold as being the UK’s answer to Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The band itself never found much success in their home country but they had enough American fans to be big in the 90s. It helped that MTV put their videos in the steady rotation.
Back in the day, a lot of Americans thought the band was named after George H.W. Bush. It’s not. It’s named after a neighborhood in London.
Enjoy!
First recorded in 1968, Donavon’s Atlantis is best-known for being the song that is playing in the background while Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci stomp Frank Vincent nearly to death in Goodfellas. In 2001, the song was used again, this time to promote a film that was actually about Atlantis. For the Atlantis: The Lost Empire soundtrack, Donavon teamed up with No Angels to record a new version of and a music video for Atlantis.
Enjoy!
This song was written about James Kimo Maano, a security guard and a good friend of Bret Michaels. Maano’s death inspired the song and, during the making of the video, footage of James Kimo Maano appeared on the screen behind Michaels in order to get a response from him. Michaels became so upset that he had to stop singing and it would be several hours before Michaels could return to the set and continue filming.
The director who so upset Bret Michaels was Marty Callner, who has directed videos for everyone from Aerosmith to Justin Timberlake. He directed several videos for Poison, both before and after the video for Something To Believe In.
Enjoy!
Today’s music video of the day features 5 Cliff Richards for the price of one.
Cliff Richard may not be well-known in the United States but he was as big as Elvis in the UK and was often described as being England’s answer to Elvis Presley, or at least he was until the Beatles came along. But even after the Beatles became a worldwide phenomenon, Cliff remained a huge star in Europe and he is the only singer in the history of music to have a #1 hit in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In fact, he holds the record for having more top ten hits than any other musician.
Cliff was also an artist who made music videos at a time when only a few did so. As opposed to other band’s early videos, Cliff’s videos were usually more than just performance clips and, in many ways, they predicted the type of videos that would dominate MTV in the 80s.
Enjoy!
Through the Shattered Lens