Category Archives: music video

Music Video Of The Day: Oh Yeah by Yello (1987, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“First I did the music and then I invited Dieter to sing along, and he came up with some lines which I thought, ‘no Dieter, it’s too complicated, we don’t need that many lyrics’. I had the idea of just this guy, a fat little monster sits there very relaxed and says, “Oh yeah, oh yeah”. So I told him, ‘Why don’t you try just to sing on and on ‘oh yeah’?… Dieter was very angry when I told him this and he said, ‘are you crazy, all the time “Oh yeah”? Are you crazy?! I can’t do this, no no, come on, come on.’ And then he said, ‘some lyrics, like “the moon… beautiful”, is this too much?!’ and I said, ‘no, it’s OK’, and then he did this ‘oh yeah’ and at the end he thought, ‘yeah it’s nice’, he loved it himself also. And also I wanted to install lots of human noises, all kind of phonetic rhythms with my mouth; you hear lots of noises in the background which are done with my mouth.”

— Yello’s Boris Blank on Oh Yeah

This is it.  This is the Ferris Bueller song.  Or maybe it’s the Secret of My Success song.  Or the She’s Out of Control song or the Opportunity Knocks song.  Or the Gran Turismo song.  Or perhaps you know it as the song that plays whenever Duffman makes an appearance on The Simpsons.

The point is, Oh Yeah has been featured in a lot of movies and TV shows.  For a while, whenever a hapless schmoe first spotted an sexy woman in a movie, you knew that the first thing you would hear would be “Oh yeah…”  Despite not being a huge hit when it was first released, it has since been used in so many films that Dieter Meier, the Yello vocalist who initially balked at doing the song, has reportedly made over $175,000,000 just by investing the royalties.  Think about that the next time you’re having to stay late at work for a conference call or you’re told to cut your hours so you don’t get overtime.

The video is just as strange as you would expect it to be.

Enjoy!

 

Music Video Of The Day: Carrie by Europe (1987, directed by Nick Morris)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The Swedish band Europe will always be best known for The Final Countdown but they also found some success with Carrie, a power ballad that was written about a break-up.  Was it a break up with girl named Carrie?  Not according to lead singer Joey Tempest, who told Songfacts that there was no Carrie.  “It was a far more general thing, actually.”

Carrie was a big hit in the United States.  In fact, in the States, Carrie even charted higher than The Final Countdown and it remains the band Europe’s highest-charting song outside of the continent of Europe.  The music video was directed by Nick Morris, who also did The Final Countdown.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Lookin’ Out My Back Door by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1970, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Despite what you may have heard, this is not a song about drugs.  The flying spoon was not for cocaine.  The animals were not the result of an acid trip.  The parade?  That was just a reference to a passage from a Dr. Seuss book.  Instead, John Fogerty wrote this song for his son, Josh, and he filled it with imagery that he thought would appeal to a 3 year-old.

The video, which was filmed long before the days of MTV, is a performance clip, featuring CCR performing the song and looking like they’re having the time of their lives doing so.  When you see everyone so happy here, it’s easy to forget that, in just another two years, John Fogerty would leave CCR and he and his former bandmates would spend the next few decades suing each other.

Just got home from Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy!
Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch
Imagination sets in, pretty soon I’m singin’
Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door
Giant doin’ cartwheels, statue wearin’ high heels
Look at all the happy creatures dancin’ on the lawn
Dinosaur Victrola list’nin’ to Buck Owens
Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door
Tambourines and elephants are playin’ in the band
Won’t you take a ride on the flyin’ spoon? Doo, doo, doo
Wond’rous apparition provided by magician
Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door
Tambourines and elephants are playin’ in the band
Won’t you take a ride on the flyin’ spoon? Doo, doo, doo
Bother me tomorrow, today, I’ll buy no sorrow
Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door
Forward troubles Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy!
Look at all the happy creatures dancin’ on the lawn
Bother me tomorrow, today, I’ll buy no sorrow
Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door

Music Video of the Day: Digging In The Dirt by Peter Gabriel (1992, directed by John Downer)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You will probably not be surprised to learn that Peter Gabriel was dealing with some stuff when he wrote the lyrics for Digging In The Dirt.  He was in the midst of a breakup with Rosanna Arquette, he was deep into therapy, and he was studying the lives of men who were on Death Row awaiting execution.  Gabriel was also reading a book, called Why We Kill, that suggested that all murderers share certain things in common, one of those being an uncontrollable anger that, much like the wasps in song’s video, can not be swatted away.  All of this contributed to a song that was one of Gabriel’s darkest, with the “dirt” standing in as a metaphor for his own personal issues.

The video features Peter Gabriel in a number of disturbing situations.  When he’s not being buried alive, he’s either arguing with a woman in a car or he’s being attacked by wasps.  The woman in the video was played by Francesca Gonshaw, who is probably best known for playing waitress Maria Recamier on the popular BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo!  

The video features a return to the claymation and the stop motion animation that was used in the video for Gabriel’s Sledgehammer.  What was used to lighthearted effect in Gabriel’s previous videos  is used to tell a much darker story in Digging in the Dirt.

Music Video of the Day: Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads (1985, directed by David Byrne and Stephen R. Johnson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“I wanted to write a song that presented a resigned, even joyful look at doom … At our deaths and at the apocalypse… (always looming, folks). I think it succeeded. The front bit, the white gospel choir, is kind of tacked on, ’cause I didn’t think the rest of the song was enough… I mean, it was only two chords. So, out of embarrassment, or shame, I wrote an intro section that had a couple more in it.”

— David Byrne on Road to Nowhere

Happy new year!

I want to start 2020 by sharing a video from one of my favorite groups, Talking Heads.  Road to Nowhere is the type of cryptic but joyful song that could only have been done by this group.  The music video features everything from David Byrne running in place to Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz aging before our eyes.

The video was co-directed by David Byne and Stephen R. Johnson.  Johnson would later direct three of Peter Gabriel’s best-known videos, Sledgehammer, Steam, and Big Time, all of which would make use the stop motion animations technique that are briefly displayed in this video.  At the time that Byne and Johnson were directing this video, Byrne was co-written the script for True Stories with actor Stephen Tobolowsky and all of the underwater scenes were filmed in Tobolowsky’s pool.  Tobolowsky has had a long career as a character actor.  He might be best known for playing Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day.

Recognize him now?

Road to Nowhere was nominated for Video of the Year at the 1986 MTV Music Video Awards but it lost to Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.  The award, that year, was presented by Don Henley, who is about as far away from Talking Heads as you can get.

Enjoy!