Tuesday was a very, very long day and you’ll have to excuse me if my brain is a little bit flat right now.
Instead of my usual explanation about why I like the apocalyptic tone of this video, I’m just going to share it and wish a happy birthday to the one and only Skrillex. Sonny John Moore, the music genius who is also known as Skrillex and whose music has been a consistent soundtrack to every worthwhile event of the past 16 years, is 32 years old today!
I’m also going to point out that this song features the amazing Alvin Risk. Love you, Alvin!
I’m also going to wish all of you a good and happy Wednesday! I’m about to pass out here but hopefully, I will wake up in a few hours and I’ll be prepared to basically conquer Wednesday and use it as a base camp for the rest of the week. Sorry if my metaphors are lacking in coherence. I haven’t had much sleep.
And, finally, I’m going to invite all of you to …. enjoy!
In just a few hours, the Oscar nominations will be announced. Is that in any way connected to the fact that today’s music video of the day is for a song called Paid For The Award?
Gee, Lisa Marie — what are you saying about our beloved Oscars!?
Calm down. I’m not saying anything. Though I may not often agree with the Academy, I don’t think they’ve been bribed or anything like that. To be honest, this song — or at least the title of this song — is probably more applicable to the Golden Globes than to the Oscars. Seriously, everyone knows that you can, at the very least, buy a Golden Globe nomination. Remember when The Tourist picked up all those nominations a few years ago? And seriously, when was the last time you even remembered that movie existed?
(I’m not really sure what the going rate for a Golden Globe nomination would be. I imagine that it’s at least somewhat expensive. I mean, I guess if I sold all of Dazzling Erin’s antique cameras and maybe some of the old Madame Alexandra dolls that we have lying around here, I might be able to afford one but it would probably be for one of the minor ones, like Best Comedy or Musical Film. But, unfortunately, I already missed my chance to bribe the Hollywood Foreign Press into nominating Cats. I missed that opportunity and let that be a lesson to you all. You miss all of the shots that you don’t pay for. Or something. I don’t know. It’s a sports metaphor and sports is a metaphor for life or something like that.)
But anyway, I like this song. You can dance to it. The video’s pretty simple but that’s okay. Not every video needs to be a huge production. Sometimes, the only thing that I video needs to do is get you in the right mood and this video does that.
It’s Rob Zombie’s birthday so happy birthday, Rob and let’s all enjoy Living Dead Girl!
Myself, I’ve always assumed that this song was named after the classic Jean Rollin film, The Living Dead Girl. Admittedly, I haven’t been able to find any specific proof of that but I’m still going to choose to believe it. The song, after all, is full of references to films like Lady Frankenstein, Daughters of the Darkness, Last House On The Left, and at least one of the Dr. Goldfoot films. So why not borrow the title from Jean Rollin?
Living Dead Girl was the 2nd single to released off of Hellbilly Deluxe, which was Rob Zombie’s first solo album after originally coming to fame as the co-founder of White Zombie. White Zombie broke up around the same time that Living Dead Girl came out. Why did White Zombie break up? Nobody’s saying.
As for the video, it’s an homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with Rob Zombie playing the Doctor and Sheri Moon Zombie playing the Living Dead Girl. The video does a pretty good job of capturing the feel of Caligari, which is one of the most effective of the old silent films. (I actually had a nightmare after I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for the first time. I dreamt that the doctor was trying to break into the house.)
Both Rob Zombie and Joseph Kahn are credited with co-directing this video. Kahn is an amazingly prolific video director who has done videos for just about everyone, including Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, The Chemical Brothers, and …. just about everyone!
Rob Zombie, of course, has gone on to direct several horror films. There’s a tendency among a certain snobbish type of horror fans to be dismissive of Zombie’s films but I’ve always felt that his film was undeniably effective and, if nothing else, they stayed true to his own vision. I mean yes, Halloween IIwas disappointing but 31 was better than many give it credit for being.
“The sad part is, I can’t really play the song live anymore because too many people misunderstand the connotations of Ground Zero. It’s not a reference to 9/11, obviously. It was written in 1986 when ‘ground zero’ just meant the epicenter of a nuclear attack.”
— Weird Al Yankovic
Try to force Weird Al to do a Christmas album and this is what you’re going to get.
In 1986, Weird Al’s record label insisted that he record something for the holiday season. In response, Yankovic came up with Christmas At Ground Zero, a Phil Spector-style production about Christmas in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. It wasn’t really what the record company had expected and, at first, they refused to release it. Yankovic responded by creating his own music video for the song. This video was not only his first stab at directing but it also proved to be popular enough to convince the record company to change their position on the song.
Though the majority of this video is made up of stock footage, the live action scenes of Weird Al and the carolers performing surrounded by rubble were filmed in The Bronx. No nuclear explosions were needed to get the bombed-out feel. Instead, they just filmed in New York in the 80s.
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.
Through the Shattered Lens 