This is a nicely evocative video, I think. Las Vegas is the quintessential American city, a celebration of commerce and hospitality that happens to be sitting out in the middle of an inhospitable desert. Vegas could only have been founded in America and it’s only in America that it could have thrived to become the iconic city that it is today.
Of course, I should also mention that, whenever I see any clips of the Las Vegas strip, I automatically think about the movie Casino and the Ace Rothstein Dancers. If I ever go to Vegas, I’m going to let Commissioner Pat Webb know that Sam “Ace” Rothstein has nothing to hide.
What happened to summer this year? Seriously, it’s just kind of flying by. We’ve got August and then the first half of September and then it’s going to be Autumn again! Get out there and enjoy yourselves while you still can!
Today’s music video of the day is all about summer. It captures a few essential truths. Number one, it’s fun to get undressed in public. Number two, if you take off enough clothes while walking down the street, some dude with a saxophone will undoubtedly start following you. What I like about this video is how everyone is both intrigued and annoyed by the saxophone player. This is a video that just captures what it’s like to be young and have your entire future ahead of you. It also captures the feeling of summer!
This video was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who apparently has directed a few films as well. No, not the Resident Evil films. That’s a different Paul Anderson, all together.
Blanck Mass is back with another unsettling video!
(That’s not a surprise. Blanck Mass kinda specializes in being unsettling.)
This video, which features a retro tv studio going crazy over some sexy apples, feels like a bit of an homage to the early work of David Cronenberg. Keep your eyes open and you’ll even spot a paperback novelization of Videodrome. And, of course, just the idea of loving being a parasite is a very Cronenbergian concept.
Yep, it’s another day, another rock show for your Cracked Rear Viewer. Tonight I’m heading down to New Bedford’s 105th annual Feast of the Blessed Sacrament (better known to us locals as The Portuguese Feast!). Tonight’s musical headliner will be none other than Scott Stapp, former lead singer of Creed, so I thought I’d share this cool video of their big hit from 2000, “With Arms Wide Open”, directed by Dave Meyers (who also directed the 2007 horror movie THE HITCHER):
Have a good night, and I’ll see you Saturday. Keep Calm and Feast On!
I like today’s music video of the day because it has a perverse retro feel to it. Like if you go to a cabin in the woods and find a dusty old VHS tape sitting in the back of a cubbyhole, this is probably what you would see after watching the tape. And then I assume that little girl from The Ring would show up.
This is one of two music videos for Miike Snow’s Animal. I prefer this one because it features some moody shots of the band standing in the rain and the whole thing has a sort of end of the world, apocalyptic feel to it. The song itself has been interpreted to be about everything from addiction to ennui to the furry sub-culture. The band has been said quoted as saying that maybe we shouldn’t try to read too much into the song.
(For the record, I have never gotten the whole “furry” thing, nor have I really had any desire to understand it. I mean, to be honest, it just seems stupid. Unfortunately, I once took a creative writing class where one of my classmates was absolutely obsessed with furries and he even wrote a play about some sort of sex-obsessed space bear. And, of course, the presidential campaign of Beto O’Rourke has put furries back in the headlines.)
Miike Snow is made up of lead singer Andrew Wyatt and Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg. Karlsson and Winberg previously produced Toxic for Britney Spears. When Animal was first released as a single, there was a lot of online speculation that the band was named after director Takashi Miike but, sadly, that turned out to be false. Apparently, the band actually is named after someone named Mike Snow. The band added an extra i because …. well, just because they felt like doing it.
Today’s music video of the day comes from the Baltimore-born rapper and producer, Sagat.
There’s actually two versions of this song. The first one, which was released in 1993 and which is still played in the clubs on The Block to this day, was called Fuk Dat and was a list of things that annoyed Sagat in ’93 and which are still annoying today. That version became a club hit but, when it was time to release the song commercially, it was obvious that the song would need a title that wouldn’t get radio stations fined by the FCC. Hence, Fuk Dat became the slightly cleaner Funk Dat.
The music video for Funk Dat was filmed on the streets of New York. The video features not only Sagat but also a really cool kid who has it up to here with the radio playing the same five songs over and over again. This video achieved perhaps its greatest exposure when it was featured on an episode of Beavis and Butthead. This song was also played on one of MTV’s dance shows on the 90s. The dancers would all shout, “Funk dat!” in unison but everyone knew what the song was actually saying.
Yesterday was the 76th birthday of Sir Michael Phillip Jagger so it seems appropriate to give him today’s music video of the day slot. Visions of Paradise was the first video off of Mick Jagger’s fourth solo album, Goddess in the Doorway.
This video was directed by Dave Meyers, who is one of those music video directors who seems to have worked with everyone. If you look over the list of videos he’s directed, you’ll see everyone from Master P to Kid Rock to Pink and Taylor Swift.
The Whispers were first formed 1964 but they had to wait 16 years before scoring the first top 20 hit in both the U.S. and the UK with And The Beat Goes On. This song was co-written by Leon F. Sylvers III, Stephen Shockley, and William Shelby. Sylvers felt that the song had little potential to be a hit. The Whisperers felt differently and they turned out to be correct.
As befits an old school song, this is an old school video, a simple performance clip of the band doing what they did best.
And The Beat Goes On is another song that I have fond memories of listening to while stealing cars in Vice City. If you haven’t been chased by a police helicopter while listening to And The Beat Goes On then what were you doing back in 2002?
Through the Shattered Lens 