Back when I was in college, I came across this music video…somehow. It has Italo disco singer Moon Ray (Raggio Di Luna) dancing in an Atari game with the occasional shot of her in a ring of fire.
Seeing as this is Italo disco, there is a French description on the video. Running it through Google Translate gives me the following:
The moonbeam in question (MoonRay) invokes the Comanchero, a character with the sulphurous reputation of the mythology of the far west and films of westerns.
The rhythmic rhythm arrives abruptly with feminine voice with the well-felt climate.
A title of the Italian-dance wave in the mid-1980s that remains a summer 1985 hit.
I didn’t know there was a “moonbeam” in question, but I guess it’s Moon Ray herself. She is invoking the Comanchero by dancing with video game graphics that invoke an unfortunate Atari game into the mind of the viewer. The yellow she is wearing is important to bringing the Comanchero. The Comanchero has a reputation “of the mythology of the far west and films of westerns.”
“The rhythmic rhythm arrives abruptly with feminine voice with the well-felt climate.” That is a line that Google translated for me. That’s all I can say about it.
That last sentence simply isn’t true. This song doesn’t remain “a summer 1985 hit.” This song remains popular today, as the video below shows, people are still doing the Comanchero.
Why? I don’t know. Much like I don’t have any other information on this one.
I mainly did the video for The Romantics’ version of Talking In Your Sleep so that I could get to the Bucks Fizz version.
Bucks Fizz was put together by Nichola Martin and Andy Hill. They wanted a group that could be entered in Eurovision with their song Making Your Mind Up. The line-up ended up being Mike Nolan, Cheryl Baker, Jay Aston, and Bobby G. Martin decided to name the group after her favorite drink, Buck’s Fizz, the group won Eurovision in 1981, and it went from there.
In 1984 they retreated from the public-eye to focus on their fourth album. They emerged in August of that year with a cover version of Talking In Your Sleep. This video was released to promote the single, which did well. Trying to make sense of this video does not go well for the viewer.
Then space folds and separates to reveal two identical, but flipped buildings with a little person dressed as a baby jumping up and down in the middle of the screen.
I could stop right there. That’s already weirder than the The Romantics’ version.
Now we pan over one of those two buildings and begin to play the game of right-side up or upside-down bicycle. This time it’s upside-down.
There’s Bobby G drinking milk while half-naked at a window–as you do.
Up on the roof, we see that the baby is jumping.
We get to see the rest of the group at their windows. My favorite is Mike Nolan, who looks like he just spotted the jumping baby up in the sky.
Now Bobby is on the roof with the baby. You can see that this is the roof with the upside-down bicycle.
We get a brief glimpse of something white over where Bobby rolled the ball. Does that mean that this baby has a corporeal form as well?
The rest of the group go up to the roof. I’m guessing Cheryl was dreaming about being someplace where it made sense to be wearing heels.
Finally, the whole group is together to forget the kind of drink they are named after.
Now the baby is jumping in Bobby’s hand.
Cut from that to Jay Aston jumping up and down on the roof.
That must be the turning point because in the next shot, we can see that the bicycle is right-side up. Mike and Jay are also frozen in place. Note that Mike is now holding the ball. Are they on the other building we saw at the beginning?
We see that Cheryl is also frozen, but is reanimated by the baby pointing at her. The same is true for Mike and Jay.
In the following shots, the video seems to confirm that Bobby is indeed on a separate roof from the rest of the group as his bicycle is up-side down…
while theirs is right-side up.
The baby walks up one of the buildings.
Mike gets a great look on his face from his apartment. Is he watching the baby? Is he really there?
Cheryl appears to enter onto the Bobby G roof.
Mike appears to enter onto the bicycle-right-side-up roof.
Now the bike looks like it’s pointing in the opposite direction. Have they switched buildings? I can’t tell.
After Cheryl gives us a, help me I’m stuck in a confusing music video face,…
we see the roof upside-down to add more confusion.
Then the band is reunited on the upside-down-bicycle roof where they appear to both push and pull on the door.
Cut back to the baby jumping up and down before the buildings disappear and space returns to normal.
I’m sure other Bucks Fizz music videos make more sense than this. They would never do a music video where Cheryl runs through Christmas trees and Captain Kidd jumps into a pool of water.
Sadly, a few months after this video was released, the group ended up in an accident while in their tour bus. They were all injured pretty badly, including Mike Nolan ending up in a coma. He woke up, but the effects are still with him to this day. You can read more over on their Wikipedia page.
The group has had a rocky history since then, but Cheryl Baker, Mike Nolan, and Jay Aston still perform with somebody else to make a foursome that goes by the name The Fizz.
The video was directed by Dieter Trattmann. He appears to have directed around 80 music videos.
The Golden Path is one of my favorite songs of all time.
I’ve been listening to it a lot this weekend, while thinking about friends and loved ones who left this world far too early. On a normal day, the combination of Wayne Coyne’s sincere delivery of “How and why did I die?” and the song’s closing chorus of “Please forgive me, I never meant to hurt you!” makes me emotional. This weekend, it’s literally brought tears to my eyes.
(Interestingly enough, in an interview with the Guardian, Coyne said the following about recording the vocals for The Golden Path: “We recorded our part very quickly, almost flippantly, like we’d get a second chance. Then Tom and Ed left a message within 20 minutes of receiving the tape. You could hear them jumping up and down in the background, shouting ‘We’re ecstatic.'”)
As for the video, it’s actually pretty simple. An office drone fantasizes of a colorful world beyond his gray existence. The dreamer is played by Fran Kranz, who you might recognize as the stoner from The Cabin In The Woods. This video was the first to be directed by Chris Milk.
When Benjamin John Power, the man behind Blanck Mass, was asked about this haunting and surreal video, this is what he told Spin:
“D7-D5′ is intended as the second move in a game of chess initially instigated by Manuel Gottsching when he released (and named said release) ‘E2-E4,’ the recording which many believe pioneered techno. The video was made by [my] good friend Jake McGowan, and follows one man whilst he struggles to deal with a flurry of emotions and human states which are common during a battle of any size, including a game of chess.”
For myself, I’ll say that this video immediately reminded me of the work of David Lynch. Of course, I’m kind of obsessed with David Lynch’s art right now. Until Twin Peaks has finished its run, I imagine that almost everything is going to remind me of Lynch in one way or another.
Still, this video is almost unsettling as that famous scene in A Field in England, that one that featured Blanck Mass’s Chernobyl playing in the background. Remember that scene?
Well, unsettling or not, Blanck Mass helps me to focus, which considering the intensity of my ADD, is no small accomplishment! If not for well-selected background music, I probably wouldn’t have been able to finish 3,000 of the 3,897 things that I have posted on this site!
This music video features digitally enhanced footage from a 1980 film called 2 Champions of Shaolin. According to Wikipedia, here’s what the video’s director, Joseph Kahn, had to say about it:
“I edited this on a laptop on a plane to Chicago. I rearranged the time sequencing of the actual movie. The bad guy with the big boombox is actually a minor henchman who dies in the first 30 minutes, but in my visual remix he’s the ultimate antagonist. The lip syncing was motion captured, then applied to 3D models of jaws. I didn’t know 100% if the technology was achievable with the time and money, nor did I know if we could actually get rights to a Chinese kung fu flick. It was a risky venture, but Carole gave me a check and then left me alone. She had some major balls.”
(And if it’s on Wikipedia, it has to be true!)
Anyway, I really love this video and the song. The only unfortunate thing is that the Get Yourself High clown doesn’t make an appearance. Who is the Get Yourself High Clown? If you’ve seen The Chemical Brothers live, there’s a good chance you’ve seen him. Check him out in this footage from their 2007 performance at Glastonbury:
Hey Boy Hey Girl is not only one of my favorite songs from The Chemical Brothers, it’s also one of my favorite videos. Admittedly, I could do without the saliva at the start of the film but that’s just because I have a thing about visible saliva. It doesn’t appeal to me. But otherwise, I absolutely love this video!
(Whenever I watch this video, I end up staring at my reflection and visualizing what my skeleton looks like. Usually, I’m impressed.)
This video was one of the many directed by Dom & Nic. Other videos that they’ve done for The Chemical Brothers: Wide Open, Midnight Madness, Salmon Dance, Believe, The Test, and Setting Sun.
Not a day goes by that I don’t see those dancing skeleton recreated in GIF form. I guess that’s because I hang out on a lot of horror-themed web sites.
I’ve seen all the Michael Bay films, so I don’t know anything about the Transformers other than what I have picked up from Phelous’ review of Transformers (G1), a top 20 list of the funniest/dumbest moments from G1, and a top 20 list of the funniest/dumbest moments from Headmasters.
That means I know that the Transformers movie that this song was used in had kids crying in the theater because it killed off a lot of the characters they loved from the series, which is funny since IMDb tells me Optimus Prime is gone in the latest one.
I know that there is a fictional Middle Eastern country in the Transformers universe called Carbombya. Why?
Also, Sea Spray falls in love with a mermaid, and jumps into a magic pool to transform into a merman.
As for the video, there are some ties to Michael Bay. One of the directors, John Beug, who was the senior vice president of video production for Warner Bros. Records said the following about Bay in the book I Want My MTV:
John Beug: Michael Bay did a couple of videos for me. I don’t think I was particularly encouraging to his career, shall we say. He did a Chicago video, and I told him I wasn’t blown away by his talent, which he reminded me of at the Pearl Harbor premiere ten years later.
There’s a sad tie between Beug and that particular movie, but you can look that up yourself.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from I Want My MTV about Michael Bay thanks to Juliana Roberts, Joni Sighvatsson, and Jeff Ayeroff:
Juliana Roberts [A music-video, film, and TV producer. She was a producer for Propaganda Film’s hard rock division, The Foundry]: Michael kind of worshipped David Fincher. We’d always crack up, because Michael would follow David around the Propaganda offices.
Joni Sighvatsson [A movie producer and a cofounder of Propaganda Films]: Fincher and Bay became adversaries. It wasn’t spoken, but it created a great deal of tension. Fincher was sophisticated. He was inspired by great photographers such as Robert Frank and Horst P. Horst. Bay was a technical genius like Fincher, but he had the mind of a teenager. His sensibility was juvenile.
Jeff Ayeroff [Was a creative director of Warner Bros. Records and the cochairman of Virgin Records America]: Michael Bay was known as “the little Fincher.” They said, “He’s not as artistic, but he’s got drive. He’s gonna chew through everything.” He did the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” for me at Virgin. He was an ego-fucking-maniac.
There are some kinder ones in there too. But I figured that if I didn’t know about his relationship with Fincher before this section of the book, then there had to be others out there that don’t either.
Personally, I can’t stand Michael Bay because he clearly has a lot of talent, but for some reason has decided not to use it…most of the time.
The video was also directed by Reynaldo Villalobos who is an accomplished cinematographer.
The video was produced by both John Beug and Kim Dempster. Dempster produced at least nine music videos, including four of them for David Fincher. She also directed the movie Marmalade (2004).
