Today’s music video of the day is the atmospheric video for Cheri, Cheri Lady by Modern Talking. This song was the only single to come off of Modern Talking’s second album and it was also their third straight single to reach number one in Germany.
This video was directed by Volker Hannwacker, who has also been credited with directing videos from Haddaway, Culture Beat, and Paradise Lost.
Enjoy!
Happy birthday to the one and only Angus Young!
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I learned something today.
Today, I learned that this song was inspired by a friend of Markita’s who was struggling with an addiction to cocaine. I’m not sure why I didn’t know that but the important thing is that, after the song was released, Markita’s friend eventually conquered their addiction.
Another thing that I learned is that Fergie sings in the chorus for this song. She and Markita knew each other from appearing on Kids Incorporated. Another thing that I learned today is that Fergie and Markita were both on Kids Incorporated. The final thing I learned is that there was a show called Kids Incorporated.
This video was directed by Jim Shea, who went on to direct several country music videos.
Enjoy!
But Not Tonight is a good example of the type of music video that used to dominate MTV, the movie soundtrack video. Depeche Mode recorded But Not Tonight for the film Modern Girls. The video cuts between scenes of the band performing and scenes taken from the movie, which is why Virginia Madsen, Daphne Zuniga, and Clayton Rohner are so prominently featured. The video did well on MTV, which didn’t translate into the movie becoming a hit.
While the movie was directed by Jerry Kramer, the video was directed by Tamra Davis. Davis was a prolific video director before moving into feature film and television directing.
Enjoy!
No one will ever accuse Rage Against The Machine of being subtle but that’s the point. Rage rarely is.
This video for this song, with its white background and exploited workers, is a parody of the peppy GAP commercials that were popular in the late 90s. “Everybody in Denial” was a play on GAP’s slogan at the time, “Everybody in Khaki.” The sweatshop workers seen in this video were all members of the UNITE! union.
The video was directed by Honey, the husband-and-wife team of Nicholas Brooks and Laura Kelly.
Like many anti-capitalist, protest songs, Guerilla Radio later turned up on the soundtrack of several video games, including Madden and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, where it was probably enjoyed by people who had absolutely no idea what the song was actually about. (I remember being amused when American Idiot used to play during one of the Maddens. It was the radio friendly version, of course.)
Enjoy!
Before I came across this video on YouTube, I had never heard this song before. I don’t know much about Modern Talking, either. I’ve noticed that, on YouTube, their videos appear to be popular with Russian viewers. Almost all of the comments are written in Cyrillic.
Even though I don’t know much about the band or the song, I still decided to go with this video because it really does epitomize an era. From the pixelated beginning to the keytar and the pink bowtie, this is a video that could only come from the 80s. Even though this song is not on the GTA: Vice City soundtrack, it feels like it should be.
Enjoy!
Every 80s hair band had to have at least one song that showed that, underneath all the debauchery and the partying, they were actually sensitive poets. Motley Crue had Home Sweet Home. Def Leppard had Two Steps Behind. And Poison had Every Rose Has Its Thorn.
This song was inspired by Bret Michaels’s relationship with his then girlfriend, Tracy Lewis. After playing a show in Dallas, Michaels called Lewis in Los Angeles and, in a scene reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, he was shocked when another man answered the phone. Michaels wrote the song the next day while sitting in a laundromat.
(Presumably, the death of the landline phone has all but eliminated the risk of getting caught cheating as a result of the wrong person answering phone.)
The concert scenes in this video were filmed at a show in Green Bay, Wisconsin while the scenes of Bret Michaels and his girlfriend (his Rose?) were filmed in a warehouse. The video’s director, Marty Callner, was one of the top music video directors of the 80s and 90s. He worked with just about everyone.
Incidentally, Poison is a band that I always used to make fun of but then I saw them interviewed in Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization Part II and they came across as being surprisingly well-adjusted, especially when compared to W.A.S.P’s Chris Holmes, who was famously interviewed while floating in a pool and pouring a bottle of vodka over himself.
Enjoy!
It’s not really about much. It’s just one of those cheap pop lyrics.
— Roland Orzabal
Today’s song of the day is especially appropriate for me because my WordPress account has been updated and, after five years of using classic editor, I’m just now figuring out how to use block editor. I can tell already that it’s going to take me a while to get the hang of this but I think I’m going to like it eventually. Change can be difficult but it can still be a good thing.
Change was Tears For Fears’s fourth released single and it was their second big hit, after Mad World. It was also their first song to chart in the United States. This video was directed by Clive Richardson, who was also responsible for several early Depeche Mode videos.
Enjoy!
More Than This was the first single to be released from Avalon, the album that would eventually become Roxy Music’s biggest seller. It was not only Roxy Music’s most popular studio album but it was also their last. Though More Than This only reached #58 on the US Charts, it’s a song that’s endured. (It did much better in the UK, reaching #6.) The song was discovered by a new generation of listeners when Bill Murray sang it in Lost In Translation.
The video is simple and very much a product of its time. Ferry performs the song and then watches himself and the band performing in what appears to be a movie theater.
Enjoy!
“I had a girlfriend when I was a teenager and somebody had called backstage to one of the shows and said, ‘Virginia still talks about you and your relationship.’ It was just one of those offhanded comments. I looked at her and just said, ‘Send her my love.’
I walked out, and it hit me: ‘Wait a minute, that’s a song!’
I went home and I called Steve Perry up and I said I came up with this idea, and we wrote it on the spot. A lot of this stuff we wrote was just on the spot. Very, very spontaneous. We kind of wrote with an urgency because we didn’t have a lot of time together. The road was hard enough. When we did write, we wrote very intense. All the lyrics were, like, within hours. We didn’t mess around.”
— Jonathan Cain on Send Her My Love
Like so many of Journey’ videos (with the notable exception of Separate Ways), the video for Send Her My Love is a no-nonsense performance clip. This video was directed by Phil Tuckett, who also directed videos for Slayer, Def Leppard, Europe, The Black Crowes, and others.
Enjoy!
Through the Shattered Lens 