Tag Archives: music video
Music Video of the Day: Devil’s Haircut by Beck (1996, directed by Mark Romanek)
What is Beck’s Devil’s Haircut about?
Not even Beck seems to be sure. According to Songfacts, Beck has offered up several different interpretations. He’s said that the song was an updated version of the American folk song, Stagger Lee:
“I don’t know if I ever HAD any youthful purity, but I can understand that you might be tempted to make commercial shit and compromise to do it. I try not to compromise on anything. I think we associate becoming an adult with compromise. Maybe that’s what the devil is. In ‘Devils Haircut’ that was the scenario. I imagined Stagger Lee… I thought, what if this guy showed up now in 1996. The song had this ’60s grooviness, and I thought of using him as a Rumplestiltskin figure, this Lazarus figure to comment on where we’ve ended up as people. What would he make of materialism and greed and ideals of beauty and perfection? His reaction would be, ‘Whoa, this is disturbing shit.'”
He’s also said that the song is simply about the evil of vanity (literally a devil’s haircut) or a song about being on tour (hence, the briefcase blues). Beck has also said that, while writing the song, he thought that “Devil’s haircut was a really bad lyric. If I can’t finish a song, I’ll just put in something temporary. That’s what ‘Loser’ was. Then the temporary one always becomes the best one, because it wasn’t all thought out.”
As for the video, director Mark Romanek claims that it was inspired by both Midnight Cowboy and The 400 Blows. Beck, wandering through New York City with his cowboy hat and his radio, was meant to be a modern-day Joe Buck while the freeze frames were inspired by the end of Truffaut’s portrait of alienated youth.
Two of the videos most memorable moments were accidental. When the car nearly runs over Beck, it is meant to recall the “I’m walking here!” scene from Midnight Cowboy but the car’s driver didn’t hit the brakes soon enough and Beck was actually hit by the car and injured his leg as a result. The other unplanned scene was when the pigeons took flight just as Beck approached them.
The video for Devil’s Haircut would go on to win two MTV Music Video Awards, one for Best Editing and one for Best Male Video.
Music Video of the Day: Addicted To You by Avicii (2014, dir by Sebastian Ringler)
This is a video that I’d love to see expanded into a movie.
We still miss you, Avicii.
RIP.
Music Video of the Day: A Different Way by DJ Snake featuring Lauv (2017, dir by Colin Triley)
When this video started, I was a bit worried that the kid was going to end up getting dragged into the sewers by Pennywise but, instead, things worked out pretty well. That’s good. This is a fun video.
Enjoy!
Music Video of the Day: Can’t Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon (1985, directed by Sherry Revord and Kevin Dole)
Do you remember the battle of the REOs?
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)
“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)
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 ????)
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)
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 ????)
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:
Through the Shattered Lens 