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!
“I felt for sometime that the motivating energy, or the captivating energy, or the engrossing energy available to us today is the energy coming from the extremes. That’s why we have Malcolm X. And somehow it’s only these extremist positions that can compel our attention. And I find in my own mind that I have to resist these extremist positions when I find myself drifting into a mystical fascism in regards to myself.
So this song, ‘First We Take Manhattan,’ what is it? Is he serious? And who is we? And what is this constituency that he’s addressing? Well, it’s that constituency that shares this sense of titillation with extremist positions. I’d rather do that with an appetite for extremism than blow up a bus full of schoolchildren.”
— Leonard Cohen, on the meaning of First We Take Manhattan
Well, that clears everything right up, doesn’t it?
Because his music was embraced by the counterculture and the folksies, Leonard Cohen has often be mischaracterized as some sort of hippie troubadour. In reality, his lyrics were frequently dark and threatening, which is one reason that a whole generation of listeners first discovered Cohen as a result of several of his song being included on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. In First We Take Manhattan, he sings from the point of view of someone who is ready to give up music and love and go to war. “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.”
Though Cohen wrote this song, it was first recorded by Jennifer Warnes in 1986. Cohen would not release his own version until two years later, when it was the first track on his album, I’m Your Man. The music video for Cohen’s version was directed by French photographer Dominique Isserman, who was in a romantic relationship with Cohen at the time. The video features Cohen on the beach, with the ocean standing in the way of his promise to take Manhattan and then Berlin.
In 2009, Cohen’s version of the song later played over the end credits of Watchmen.
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.
Four years ago, at the age of 69, David Bowie died of liver cancer. Just as how there was no way that we couldn’t highlight a Bowie video on his birthday, there’s also no way that, on this day, we can’t share another video from him.
Golden Years was one of Bowie’s signature tunes. Angela Bowie claimed that the song was written for her but David never denied or confirmed that claim. David Bowie did say that he originally tried to give the song to Elvis Presley but Elvis turned it down. At that time, Elvis probably did not want to be reminded that he was in his “golden years.”
In 1975, in the days before MTV, music videos were often simply performance clips. The video for Golden Years was taken from Bowie’s performance on Soul Train. Bowie appeared on the show on November 4th, 1975 and he performed both Golden Years and Fame. Bowie was only the 2nd white artist to ever appear on Soul Train. (The first was Elton John.) A lifelong fan of American R&B, Bowie was a huge Soul Train fan and was reportedly so nervous about appearing on the show that he actually got a little drunk before his performance.
“It’s not about being unable to dance. It’s about guys that look good but can’t string a sentence together. Each verse is a piss-take at the scenario of a jeans commercial. It was good fun, but the audience thought, ‘What does he mean that he can’t dance?’ They didn’t see the humor, and it killed the fun.”
— Phil Collins on I Can’t Dance
Ok, Phil. Whatever you say.
Tony Banks, Genesis’s keyboardist, has said that the song actually came about because he and Mike Rutherford were fooling around with various sounds in the recording studio and Phil, hearing what they were doing, suddenly sang out, “I can’t dance!” The song started out as an improvised joke but then went on to become one of the band’s biggest hits. It was also nominated for a Grammy.
The end of the video is meant to be a parody of the original ending of Michael Jackson’s video for Black or White. Black or White originally ended with Michael Jackson’s dancing erratically and destroying a car. I Can’t Dance ends with Tony and Mike dragging Phil away before can do too much damage.
“In England, it was always presumed that it was written about the space landing, because it kind of came to prominence around the same time. But it actually wasn’t. It was written because of going to see the film 2001, which I found amazing. I was out of my gourd anyway, I was very stoned when I went to see it, several times, and it was really a revelation to me. It got the song flowing. It was picked up by the British television, and used as the background music for the landing itself. I’m sure they really weren’t listening to the lyric at all. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to juxtapose against a moon landing. Of course, I was overjoyed that they did. Obviously, some BBC official said, ‘Oh, right then, that space song, Major Tom, blah blah blah, that’ll be great.’ ‘Um, but he gets stranded in space, sir.’ Nobody had the heart to tell the producer that.”
— David Bowie on Space Oddity
Today would have been David Bowie’s 73rd birthday so it only seems appropriate that he should be honored with our latest selection for music video of the day.
Though it may be hard to believe today, David Bowie was not an overnight success. Bowie spent five years drifting from band to band and experimenting with different types of music before he finally released his first solo album, which failed to chart. Space Oddity, which was the first single to be released off of his second album, was fortunate enough to come out at a time when the entire world was watching the moon landing. It captured the public’s imagination and so, of course, did Bowie. Space Oddity launched Bowie’s career and also made a legend out of an enigmatic astronaut named Major Tom.
This music video was Bowie’s first. It was actually filmed as part of a 30-minute promotional film called Love You Till Tuesday. The film was originally meant to feature Bowie singing seven of his songs. It was only at the last minute that Bowie decided to add a performance of Space Oddity as well. Bowie was only 22 when this was shot and, not surprisingly, the influence of Kubrick’s 2001 can be felt throughout the Space Oddity video.
Despite Bowie’s success and growing fame, Love You Til Tuesday failed to attract much interest from potential buyers and it sat on the shelf until 1984, when it was finally given a VHS release.
“The song is a composite and fictional narrative in the first person, drawn from different stories I heard growing up around Army bases. This song is about the Vietnam War and the impact on soldiers returning to a country that wrongly blamed them for the war.”
— Michael Stipe, on the meaning of Orange Crush
“I must have played this song onstage over three hundred times, and I still don’t know what the fuck it’s about. The funny thing is, every time I play it, it means something different to me, and I find myself moved emotionally. Noel Coward made some remark about the potency of cheap music, and while I wouldn’t describe the song as cheap in any way, sometimes great songwriting isn’t the point. A couple of chords, a good melody and some words can mean more than a seven-hundred-page novel, mind you. Not a good seven-hundred-page novel mind you, but more say, a long Jacqueline Susann novel. Well alright, I really liked Valley of the Dolls.”
— Peter Buck, on the meaning of Orange Crush
“Mmm, great on a summer’s day. That’s Orange Crush.”
— Simon Parkin, after R.E.M. performed Orange Crush on Top of the Pops
Despite (or perhaps because of) all of the differing opinions as to what the song is actually about, Orange Crush is one of R.E.M.’s signature songs. It was not only a hit in the U.S. but it was also their highest charting single in the UK. It was the popularity of this song that led to R.E.M. being invited to make their first appearance on Top of the Pops, where host Simon Parkin assumed that the song was about the soft drink instead of the cancer-causing defoliant used in Vietnam.
This video, which won the inaugural Best Post-Modern Video award at the VMAs, was directed by photographer Matt Mahurin. Mahurin has directed several music videos, including the video for Metallica’s Enter Sandman. His most notorious work, though, might be a 1994 Time Magazine cover that featured a heavily darkened version of O.J. Simpson’s mugshot.
This song, one of the first hit rap songs about drugs, is often mistakenly described as being a collaboration between Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel. Grandmaster Flash actually had nothing to do with the song. He had already left Sugar Hill Records before the song was even recorded. When the single was first released, it was credited to “Grandmaster and Melle Mel,” in order to create the impression that Flash was involved. In his autobiography, Flash wrote that he once heard the song was while he was on the way to buy crack and, at that moment, he felt that Melle Mel was specifically speaking to him.
This song was recorded at a time when much of America — specifically, white America — was either unaware of or unconcerned with the drug epidemic that was ravaging America’s poorest neighborhoods. White Lines attacks both cocaine and a legal system that punishes poor black kids more harshly than rich, white businessmen. “The businessman who is caught with 24 kilos” is a reference to car manufacturer John DeLorean, who was arrested after trying to buy 24 kilos from an undercover FBI agent. DeLorean was later acquitted after he made the case that the FBI agent had entrapped him.
(DeLorean today is best remembered for designing the car made famous by Back to the Future. Between 1981 and 1983, 9,000 Deloreans were manufactured and 6,500 of them are reported to still be in working condition. I once came across a classified ad from someone who was looking to sell his DeLorean. I called and offered him a thousand dollars. He laughed and hung up.)
This video was shot by Spike Lee, who was a film student at NYU at the time and yes, that is Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne appeared in this video shortly after playing Cutter in Death Wish II and he has the same look in the video as he did in the movie.
Through the Shattered Lens 