I agree!
Enjoy!
I agree!
Enjoy!
When this song came on my car radio last week, I immediately knew I had to do a “One Hit Wonders” post on it, so without any further ado, here’s Canadian New Wave pop rockers Men Without Hats doing their #3 smash dance hit “The Safety Dance”:
The band was led by singer/songwriter Ivan Doroschuck, who claimed he penned the bouncy tune in response to nightclubs banning pogo dancing, then a hot thing. At the time of recording the song and others for the album “Rhythm of Youth”, the group consisted of Ivan’s brothers Colin (guitars) and Stefan (bass), Allen McCarthy (keyboards/electronics), and Martin Cartier (percussion). The silly, Renaissance Fair-looking video got in heavy rotation on MTV (remember when they actually played music all day?), which aided it’s rise to the top of the pop charts.
Men Without Hats have gone through multiple personell changes over the years, with Ivan…
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This makes three Tim Pope music videos now. We saw him do a video for Ministry when they were very unhappy. We also saw him do a video for Talk Talk when they didn’t mind appearing in the video, but weren’t going to lip-sync. Now we get Tim Pope doing The Safety Dance? By that I mean I have no idea other than that they all do fall under New Wave. Your guess is as good as mine.
I look at this video and not only think it screams British, but also do Louise Court and Mike Edmonds have reunions from time to time to talk about being in this music video that they will never live down? It could be happening. The ladies from Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love do that, so why not these two? Especially since Louise Court was recently found in 2013 working as a director of Hearst Magazine UK. Up till then it was a mystery who this woman was in one of the most well known and aired music videos every made. That’s awesome and really sad. I’ve said it before, but submit music videos to IMDb. They clearly want to put a stop to nonsense like that continuing.
I also look at this music video and see something cheap that was thrown together in a day or so at most. The only particularly interesting parts come right at the very end when the lead singer looks up into the sky and it cuts to a bomb being dropped from a plane as the song starts to sound like a siren. Along with that part, this was apparently done as a protest against the way bouncers were treating a new form of dancing in clubs. Despite it looking like a violent dance, it’s a safe dance that they felt discriminated against for doing in clubs. That’s why the bomb dropping thing happens. It represented the establishment, and the dance was anti-establishment.
The main portion of this video involves the lead singer marching into town and drawing a crowd to come along and dance with him. The ending part though where everyone is just dancing around for fun makes the most sense to me considering the intended message. “Everybody’s taking a chance,” but “it’s safe to dance.”
In what will be one of several posts about my experience during this year’s Anime Expo 201, I have chosen to begin this series by choosing the latest “AMV of the Day”. While I wasn’t present when this video was shown to attendees (the schedule for the AMV contest panel conflicted with several other panels pantsukidasai56 and I were already committed to attending) I still sought it afterwards.
“Safety Dance” by Shin (listed under the Youtube account of tehninjarox) was well-received by those who attended the AMV Contest panel. While it didn’t win Best Comedy category it was picked as the winner of the Random/Fun category which is like the place where the hard to categorize and label videos end up. It’s a hodgepodge group of videos which tend to range from the weird, funky right up to just plain psychedelic.
The video is another feather in the cap of Shin who is considered one of the top AMV producers. Using the song “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats (plus some dialogue from Futurama) and the quirky anime series Nichijou, Shin has created a really hilarious and unique AMV which really shows his editing skill in keeping the song in-sync with the anime characters in the video. The anime itself works well with the song with all the scenes of dancing (funny dancing but dancing nonetheless).
I think if I was present during the AMV Contest when this video played at Anime Expo 2012 I probably would’ve voted for this to win. I’m just glad that many others thought the same and made sure it won.
Anime: Nichijou
Song: “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats feat. dialogue from Futurama
Creator: Shin (tehninjarox)
Past AMVs of the Day