Music Video of the Day: Can’t Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon (1985, directed by Sherry Revord and Kevin Dole)

Posted on September 7, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

There was once a speed metal band out of Texas that played music that was loud, aggressive, fast, and definitely not radio friendly. The name of that band was REO Speedealer and they had a strong cult following among metal fans across the country. In 1998, after they had released their third CD under that name, REO Speedealer received a cease-and-desist letter from REO Speedwagon.

As REO Speedealer’s bassist, “Hot” Rod Skelton explained it to MTV, “”They’re worried about our name being close enough to their name that it would be a conflict in stores. I think it’s silly, but there have been a couple of people who supposedly thought they were buying their record and they bought ours. They e-mail us and say, ‘I think your band sucks shit.’ I think that’s hilarious. We consider that a compliment.”

‘In the same MTV story, REO Speedwagon’s manager, John Baruck argued, “We spent 30 years developing the name REO Speedwagon and promoting their career. To have another band come out and take three-quarters of the name didn’t seem right.”

In hindsight, I can see where REO Speedwagon was coming from but a cease-and-desist letter still doesn’t seem like a very “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” thing to do. Of course, just listening to any of REO Speedwagon’s songs will reveal that they were never about any of those things. REO Speedwagon’s music was the epitome of soft rock. While REO Speedealer was performing songs like Double Clutchin’ Finger Fuckin’, REO Speedwagon was best known for Keep on Loving You and Can’t Fight This Feeling.

In 1998, it was easy to cast REO Speedwagon as a bunch of bitter has-beens but, to their credit, their music epitomized an era. Can’t Fight This Feeling is one of the essential songs of the mid-1980s. It was also one of their biggest hits, spending three weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. When REO Speedwagon appeared at Live Aid, Can’t Fight This Feeling was the song that they performed.

(Their Live Aid performance was introduced by someone else who epitomized an era, Chevy Chase.)

Two music videos were releases for Can’t Fight This Feeling. One was a simple video that featured the band performing. The second one, which is also the one at the top of this post, began with a baby and ended with an old man and was supposed to be about the life-cycle.

Can’t Fight This Feeling continues to be one of REO Speedwagon’s best known songs. It’s another song that I automatically associate with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It can be heard on Emotion 98.3. It was playing the night that I first drove my car into the ocean and discovered that Tommy Vercetti couldn’t swim.

REO Speedwagon is still together and, this summer, toured with Chicago. REO Speedealer is also still together, though they are now simply known as Speedealer. According to their Facebook page, they should be releasing their new album, Blue Days/Black Knights, in early 2019.

Music Video of the Day: Peace Sells by Megadeth (1986, directed by Robert Longo)

Posted on September 6, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

“I was homeless at the time, and I was living in a rehearsal place in Vernon, California. I was seeing a girl, Diana – there were a lot of songs I wrote about her. I actually wrote the lyrics to that song on the wall, in that building. I didn’t have any paper in the studio, but I had a Sharpie, so I just wrote on the wall. Whoever inherited our rehearsal room after I moved out, saw the original lyrics to ‘Peace Sells’ on the wall. They probably painted right over it and didn’t even know it.”

— Dave Mustaine on Peace Sells

The video for Peace Sells was directed by the painter, Robert Longo, and is probably best known for the cut scene that features a teenager in a Slayer t-shirt telling his angry father that the video and the news are one in the same. Among Longo’s other videos: R.E.M.’s The One I Love and New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle. He also directed the regrettable cyberpunk movie, Johnny Mnemonic.

If the opening bass line sounds familiar, you may have heard it used as the opening theme for MTV News. Or maybe, like me, you spent an early being chased by the police in Vice City while listening to Megadeth on V-Rock.

Gotta love those Vice City memories!

Music Video of the Day: 19 by Paul Hardcastle (1985, directed by Jonas McCord and Bill Couturié)

Posted on September 5, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

In 1982, ABC News produced a documentary called Vietnam Requiem. Directed by Bill Couturié and Jonas McCord, Vietnam Requiem deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder that was suffered by many veterans of the Vietnam War. During the documentary, it was stated that the average of the soldier in Vietnam was 19.

Among those who watched the documentary when it finally aired in 1984 was musician Paul Hardcastle. Struck by the contrast between his life at 19 with the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam, Harcastle created a song called 19, which heavily sampled Vietnam Requiem‘s narration, which was provided by veteran announced Peter Thomas.

The song became an unexpected hit in both the UK and the US. In fact, it was so unexpected that no one had even planned to produce a video for it. When 19 reached the top of the UK Singles charts, McCord and Couturié were asked to quickly assemble a video for it.

The majority of the video is made up of clips from Vietnam Requiem. The journalist who is seen reporting on the war is Frank Reynolds, who was the notoriously prickly anchor of ABC News from 1978 until 1983. (Reynolds is best known for shouting, “Let’s get it nailed down … somebody … let’s find out! Let’s get it straight so we can report this thing accurately!” during coverage of the attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan. All in all, that’s not a bad thing for a journalist to yell.) ABC news later objected to the use of their footage in the video, claiming that being associated with MTV would “trivialize” the news. A second version of the video was produced, using public domain stock footage but ABC did allow Reynolds’s voice to continue to be heard in the song.

Now considered to be a classic one-hit wonder, 19 briefly entered the UK charts again, in 2011, when Manchester United used the song to celebrate their 19th Premier League title.

Music Video of the Day: I’m Eighteen by Alice Cooper (1971, directed by ????)

Posted on September 4, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

In an interview with Songfacts, drummer Neal Smith had the following to say about I’m Eighteen:

“It was a song about growing up in the ’60s, with lines in it like you could go to war but you couldn’t vote. We had no idea it would become an anthem; we were just thinking it would be a cool song.”

I’m Eighteen was not only Alice Cooper’s first big hit but it also played an important role in music history when, in 1975, a nineteen year-old John Lydon auditioned for the Sex Pistols by miming along to the song. Lydon’s audition took place at a pub and Lydon later explained that the jukebox was filled with “that awful 60s mod music” and I’m Eighteen was the only song in it that he could tolerate.

Music Video of the Day: Money for Nothing by Dire Straits (1985, directed by Steve Barron)

Posted on September 3, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

In a 1984 interview, Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler had this to say about the song that would not only become the band’s biggest hit but also one of the best known videos from the early years of MTV:

The lead character in “Money for Nothing” is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real….

According to Knopfler, he was in a New York appliance store when he heard a man who worked there complaining about all of the TVs in the shop being tuned to MTV. (Urban legend has it that the man was watching a Motley Crue video.) Knopfler wrote down the man’s exact words, which included the famous line about “money for nothing and chicks for free,” and later set them to music. (Knopfler also included the man’s controversial description of a rock star as being “that little faggot with the earring and the makeup.” In 2011, 26 years after the song’s initial release, that line would lead to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council banning the song from being played on Canadian radio stations.) After hearing the band’s initial recording of the song, Sting suggested the “I want my MTV” line and was rewarded with a co-writer credit.

The ground-breaking music video was one of the first to feature computer animation. Under the direction of Steve Barron, Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair (who later founded Rainmaker Studios) created the animation using a Bosch FGS-4000 CGI system and a Quantel Paintbox system.

Money for Nothing spent 3 weeks as the number one single in the United States and the video was named Video of the Year at the 3rd Annual MTV Music Awards.

Music Video of the Day: Dangerous by Big Data (2014, dir by ????)

Posted on September 2, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s music video of the day, we have one final video for the greatest song of the ’10s, Dangerous by Big Data. In this video, Big Data performs the song on the ALT98.7 FM Penthouse rooftop at the Historic Hollywood Tower.

Enjoy!

Previous Dangerous Videos:

Music Video Of The Day: Dangerous by Big Data (2014, dir by ????)

Posted on September 1, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

With each passing day, I became more and more convinced that Big Data’s Dangerous is the most important song of the 2010s. No other song quite captures our paranoid times like this one:

How could you know, how could you know
That those were my eyes?
Peepin’ through the floor, it’s like they know
It’s like they know I’m looking from the outside
And creepin’ to the door, it’s like they know
And now they’re coming, yeah, now they’re coming
Out from the shadows
To take me to the court because they know
Gotta shut this down
‘Cause they been watching all my windows
They gathered up the warrant ’cause they

You understand, I got a plan for us
I bet you didn’t know that I was dangerous
It must be fate, I found a place for us
I bet you didn’t know someone could love you this much

How could they know, how could they know
What I’ve been thinking?
Like they’re right inside my head because they know
Because they know, what I’ve been hiding
They’re right under my bed, they’re on patrol
Here they come, yeah, here they come
Out of the shadows
To take me to the court because they know
Gotta shut this down
‘Cause they’ve been watching all my windows
They gathered up the warrant ’cause they

You understand, I got a plan for us
I bet you didn’t know that I was dangerous
It must be fate, I found a place for us
I bet you didn’t know someone could love you this much

Nobody’s listening when we’re alone
Nobody’s listening, there’s nobody listening
No one can hear us when we’re alone
No one can hear us, no, no one can hear us

I’ve gotta get out of here
Sink down, into the dark
Keep on runnin’
And I’ve gotta get out of here
Keep on runnin’
Sink down, into the dark

You understand, I got a plan for us
I bet you didn’t know that I was dangerous
It must be fate, I found a place for us
I bet you didn’t know someone could love you this much

Valerie already shared two other videos for Dangerous. Here’s another one of Big Data performing at Los Angeles’s KROQ Red Bull Sound Space. While the studio version features Joywave’s Daniel Armbruster performing the vocals, this live version is performed by Alan Wilkis and Liz Ryan.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: If You Really Love Nothing by Interpol (2018, dir by Hala Matar)

Posted on August 31, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have to admit that this is yet another video that I initially assumed was about vampires. Apparently, it’s not.

My second guess was that it was about the Russian mafia but then they started breaking those plates and I decided that it was more likely that the club was owned by the Greek mafia.

Actually, I think the video’s just about Kristen Stewart doing what she wants and generally kicking ass. That’s why I like this video. The meaning is less important than the style.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Just For One Day by David Guetta featuring David Bowie (2003, dir by Richard Fenwick)

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This song, of course, features a sample from David Bowie’s Heroes.

As for the video, I always assume that everyone here is having one last party before a gigantic meteor crashes into the planet and wipes out all human life. To be honest, I tend to assume that most music videos are about humanity’s attempt to ignore the fact that everyone’s life will eventually end in a combination of misery, death, and absolutely horror.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Wild Night by John Mellencamp, featuring Me’shell Ndegeocello (1994, directed by Jonathan Kaplan)

Posted on August 29, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

Today’s music video of the day is for John Mellencamp’s cover of Van Morrison’s Wild Night.

Back in the day, the opening of this video was the most popular 40 seconds on MTV. I have traveled in a lot of taxi cabs and I regularly use both Uber and Lyft. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some very good drivers but none of them appeared in the 1992 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The driver, in this video, is played by Shana Zadrick, a model who was often compared to Cindy Crawford.

Back in 1994, if you enjoyed this video, you could go down to your friendly neighborhood Musicland (or Suncoast Motion Picture Company) and, for just $19.98, you could see even more of Shana in this commemorative video:

The other good thing about this video is that bassline, which was provided by Me’shell Ndegeocello. Wild Night was released at the same time that Ndegeocello had her biggest solo hit, If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).

This video was directed by Jonathan Kaplan. A former film school classmate of Martin Scorsese’s, Kaplan got his start directing films like Night Call Nurses and The Student Teachers for Roger Corman. He eventually became a mainstream film and television director. His most highly regarded film is probably 1988’s The Accused, for which Jodie Foster won her first Oscar.