I’ve always liked this song, perhaps even more so than The Wallflowers’s best known song, One Headlight. Jakob Dylan (who certainly has the talent necessary to be worthy of being known as something more than just “Bob’s son”) was inspired to write this song by a homeless man who he used to see on 6th Avenue. One day, the homeless man was gone but all of his possessions were still sitting on the sidewalk. As the days passed, the man’s possessions disappeared one-by-one. Jakob considers this to be the first true song that he ever wrote.
This music video was directed by David Fincher, who you may have heard of.
Here’s a music video for anyone who is working hard on Labor Day.
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.
Pop Muzik, which was written from the perspective of a DJ, was arguably the first new wave hit and this music video was extremely popular during the early years of MTV. The video was the first to be directed by Brian Grant, who was a BBC producer at the time. Working with a £2000 budget, Grant created a video that was revolutionary for the time. (In the late 70s, music videos were mostly just straight performance clips.) The success of Pop Muzik led to Grant becoming one of the busiest music video directors around. Grant went on to direct videos for The Human League, The Fixx, Squeeze, Duran Duran, and many others. If you were a New Wave group, Brian Grant probably directed at least one video for you.
An instant hit when it was first released in 1976, More Than A Feeling was a song that spent several years in the making. The founder of Boston, MIT graduate Tom Scholz, spent five years working on the song, recording and re-recording it in his basement while working his day job at Polaroid.
When Boston finally signed with CBS Records, More Than A Feeling was the first single released off of their debut album and it has since remained a classic rock mainstay, with the chorus riff becoming one of the most familiar sounds in the history of rock. Scholz has said that he was inspired to write More Than A Feeling by the Left Bank’s song, Walk Away Renée. “I see my Marianne walk away” was a reference to an older cousin whom Tom Scholz had a crush on when he was nine years old.
For me, though, More Than A Feeling will always be the song that I used to listen to whenever I was driving a stolen car around San Andreas, looking for hot coffee and trying to avoid the police.
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 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 video was directed by the French mime, dancer, and choreographer, Philippe Decouflé. Starting with a slap fight to end all slap fights, it also features a person in green makeup hand signing the song’s lyrics. As is so often the case with New Order, what it all actually means is open to interpretation.
Philippe Decouflé went on to direct the video for the Fine Young Cannibals’ She Drives Me Crazy, as well as choreographing the opening ceremony of the 1992 Winter Olympics.
This song spent 109 weeks on the charts after its release and it remains one of Mötley Crüe’s most popular singles.
Nikki Sixx, who wrote the song, later told Rolling Stone that the song was based on several different drug dealers that he had done business with before getting sober. Just two years before Dr. Feelgood became a hit, Sixx had been a notorious junkie who, after a heroin overdose, was actually legally dead for two minutes before a paramedic was able to revive him with two shots of adrenaline.
Dr. Feelgood became Mötley Crüe’s first and, to date, only gold single in the United States. The video follows the song’s title character as he goes from working the streets to owning a mansion. In a repeat of what happened to Tony Montana, Dr. Feelgood’s own hubris eventually brings him down. As for why Mötley Crüe is performing in a revival tent, it probably just looked cool.
Director Wayne Isham is one of the most recognizable names when it comes to music video directors. If you were someone who was anyone in the music business, Isham probably directed at least one video for you.
A New York-based band that once featured Madonna on drums, Breakfast Club’s biggest hit was Drive My Car, a cover of a song that had previously been made famous by The Beatles. The cover appeared on the soundtrack of License to Drive, one of the better films to co-star Corey Haim and Corey Feldman.
The video is the usual combination of clips from the film and scenes of the band acting crazy. Since they were already covering a Beatles song, it made sense to go ahead and put Breakfast Club in a 1980s version of Hard Day’s Night and have them spend most of the video trying to escape their obsessed fans. Luckily, they’ve got an invisible car.
Breakfast Club split up shortly after the release of License to Drive.
This song was a part of an attempt to rebrand Donny Osmond as a contemporary rocker. The song was a hit and the video was popular on MTV but once an Osmond, always an Osmond.
The video is pure Michael Bay. Donny, several hot women, and a group of construction workers drive out to the middle of the desert. While Donny looks over blue prints and gives orders, the models and the day laborers start carrying boards and hammering nails. Are they building a house or a temple? No, it turns out that they’re building a stage so that Donny can perform in front of an audience that spontaneously shows up. Donny does such a good job performing that it starts to rain and the video goes from being in black and white to being in color. Bay directs with the same style that he would later bring to his feature films. This video presents Donny Osmond as an epic hero and it nearly works.
It would be easy to mistake this video for being the most wholesome beer commercial ever made.
Who were Blotto? A new wave band from Albany, New York, they had a strong cult following among college students in the late 70s and early 80s. Much like the Ramones, all the band members used pseudonyms and took Blotto as their last name. Among the members were: Bowtie Blotto, Broadway Blotto, Cheese Blotto, Lee Harvey Blotto, Sergeant Blotto, Blanche Blotto, and Chevrolet Blotto.
I Wanna Be A Lifeguard was probably their best known song, as it was adopted as an anthem by the Jones Beach lifeguards. Blotto and I Wanna Be A Lifeguard were championed by Dr. Demento and, like all good, quirky New York bands, they appeared on both The Joe Franklin Show and the Uncle Floyd Show. Today, it’s clear to see that Blotto were ahead of their time. The band’s mix of humor and music are tailor-made for the age of YouTube and social media.
As for the video, it was filmed by video production students at SUNY Albany. It was also the 36th music video to be played on MTV, airing during the first day of MTV’s existence. MTV didn’t have many music videos to choose from in 1981 and the majority of the videos that they did play on their first day came from Rod Stewart. But MTV still found time for this quirky band from Albany and their song about being a lifeguard.
Through the Shattered Lens 