Music Video of the Day: The Shuttered Palace by Ellen Foley (1981, dir. ???)

Posted on September 1, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

A few months ago I came across this music video. I liked it immediately. I became hooked on her when I listened to some of her previous stuff, such as a cover of The Rolling Stones’ Stupid Girl.

I thought this was the first time I had come across Foley. Hardly.

If you’ve listened to the Bat Out Of Hell album by Meat Loaf, then her vocals should sound familiar. She’s the one who sang on songs like Paradise By The Dashboard Light. Karla DeVito is the one in the video lip-syncing Foley’s vocals.

There’s another place I already knew her from that reached back to my childhood: Night Court. She played Billie. The one-season defense attorney till they got Markie Post.

Night Court

I’m sure it’s just coincidence, but I love that the first outfit she wore on the show looks like one she wore in this video.

I can understand why they replaced her. Even if they hadn’t been looking for Post to begin with, I don’t remember her character being well-written, funny, or her being properly cast in the role to begin with. None of which are her fault. She just seemed out of place.

Along those lines, the album this song is on–her second–doesn’t appear to have done well. Having listened to other songs on the album…well, she’s not Kate Bush despite the songs trying to present her such. I like this particular video, but again, she’s not the Kate Bush-type no matter what outfits they have her wear.

Looking around, the Ellen Foley below during a live performance of Stupid Girl is more representative of her than this video.

I included that last one because I can’t be the only one thinks the lady in green looks an awful lot like Rena Riffel from Showgirls 1 & 2. She would’ve had to have been 11 there, so I’m sure it isn’t her.

Despite this song and music video not being the best of introductions to her material in general, along with the fact that I have no idea what the lyrics Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote for her mean, it strikes a chord with me.

At the time, she was dating Mick Jones, and The Clash backed her on all the songs off the album.

I couldn’t find out who directed this video. I have a guess though. Foley sang backup vocals in 1984 on Joe Jackson’s album Body & Soul. This one screams the videos Steve Barron did for Jackson: Real Men, Steppin’ Out, and Breaking Us In Two.

I’ll do other, more Ellen Foley, Ellen Foley music videos in the future. But I wanted to start with my introduction.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Breakaway by Tracey Ullman (1983, dir. Dave Robinson)

Posted on August 31, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

When I was a kid, all I knew about Tracey Ullman was that she did a show called Tracey Takes On… I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know that she did a show prior to that called The Tracey Ullman Show. So all I knew was that she was a comedian famous for impersonations. I most certainly didn’t know she ever did music. Much to my surprise, this video recently showed up in my YouTube feed.

Apparently, she had short-lived music career in the early-to-mid-80s that sprung out of a encounter with the wife of the head of Stiff Records, Dave Robinson. This was the first single off her debut album.

Dave Robinson himself appears to have directed this appropriately 1960s-inspired video for Ullman’s cover of the 1964 song originally performed by Irma Thomas.

It’s quite cheap. It appears to be best remembered for Ullman singing into a brush.

A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, dir. Jack Sholder)

I want to know why there is a plane on top of the building (left) and what looks like a creepy clown head on the top shelf (right).

It’s still catchy, fun, and the editing does draw you in into the song, regardless of it having to use the white dimension several times.

From taking a quick glance at her next video for the song They Don’t Know, her videos got more impressive. But we can’t jump right to the video where we see the Rank Films gong-guy with a package, and Paul McCartney ending up with Ullman. We need to start with her first video.

Dave Robinson appears to have directed around 22 videos.

The video was produced by John Mills and prolific music video director Nigel Dick, who were also the art directors.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) by Eurythmics (1983, dir. Jon Roseman & Dave Stewart)

Posted on August 30, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

Like Blue Monday 88, I’m not doing this because of Atomic Blonde (2017). Movin’ on.

Sweet dreams are made of these. Who am I to disagree?

Not me with this song or video. But I don’t think the 1985 biopic about Patsy Cline had the right to call itself Sweet Dreams.

It’s riddled with problems from the fact that it doesn’t have a story to tell to something as simple as continuity. It also has no dignity.

Sweet Dreams (1985, dir. Karel Reisz)

Yes, it really does cut directly from that sex scene to Patsy Cline ironing her husband’s shirt with a closeup of his last name–Dick. What a wonderful way to honor her memory. An obviously rushed production made to cash-in on the success of the producer’s 1980 film about Lorreta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter.

I knew about this song beforehand, but I will give credit to the 1996 NBC TV Movie, Sweet Dreams, for reminding me it exists by it featuring Marilyn Manson’s cover version.

Sweet Dreams (1996, dir. Jack Bender)

I do have a copy of this movie where then Tiffani-Amber Thiessen gets amnesia. I spent a decade looking for it after its original airing in 1996, and that 1985 film didn’t help my search when the TiVo was looking for movies with the title Sweet Dreams. It’s not weird!

Neither is the fact that the origin of this video begins with Dave Stewart having a lung that kept collapsing.

In the book, I Want My MTV, he states that he was quite ill at the start of the group because he had a lung that kept collapsing. I don’t want to paraphrase what he has to say about how he came to love mixing images with music, so here’s an excerpt from the book:

I had just gotten out of surgery, and they must’ve given me tons of morphine or something, because my head started to explode with the idea of visual imagery and making music. From then on, I was obsessed with videos.

Just before that, a weird thing happened: I was walking down the street in Australia and stepped on something quite hard. I looked down and it was a solid gold bracelet. I picked it up, and as I turned the corner, I saw a pawnshop. I swapped the bracelet for an 8mm cine camera. From that moment on, I was always filming. I started to understand about putting imagery together with music.

There are two obvious questions that come up when you watch this music video:

Why the cow?
How did they get away with Annie Lennox wearing a matching suit with Stewart?

Jon Roseman, producer: Dave had a tremendous feel for images. People often ask me, “How did you come up with the idea of the cow?” I tell them, “Dave just said, ‘Let’s have a cow.'”

If Stewart wants to be a smoking caterpillar, then he gets to be a smoking caterpillar.

Don’t Come Around Here No More by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers (1985, dir. Jeff Stein)

If Stewart wants a cow, then he gets a cow.

It doesn’t matter how difficult it may have been to do so:

Dave Stewart: I presented the treatment to the label, and they could not understand the bit with the cow. The cow was complicated, because we were in London, and the cow had to go down an elevator into the basement. The farmer who owned the cow was really agitated.

Annie Lennox: “Sweet Dreams” was shot in a basement studio in the middle of London. There was an elevator big enough to take the cow down from the ground floor. That was one of the most surreal moments I’ve had–being in a building with a cow walking around freely.

Little known fact, Dave Stewart is a Beastmaster.

Annie Lennox: During the scene where Dave is sitting at a prototype computer, tapping the keyboard, the cow’s head came really close to him.

Annie Lennox: I could see that happening and I thought, Oh shit, what is the cow going to do? It was almost nudging him. And Dave is so intuitive, he just rolled his eyes, so it looks like there was some kind of understanding between him and the cow. Like the cow had been told, “Right, so you do this and then Dave’s gonna do this. And…ACTION!”

Look into the eyes of Dave Stewart!

Lennox explains the purpose of the cow:

In a way, the video is a statement about the different forms of existence. Here are humans, with our dreams of industry and achievement and success. And here is a cow. We share the same planet, but it’s a strange coexistence.

As for how Annie Lennox got away with wearing a matching suit with Stewart:

Dave Stewart: “Sweet Dreams” prompted a big argument with the record company. They were pissed off when Annie and I turned up in matching suits, with Annie’s hair cropped off. They wanted her to wear a dress. They were like, “We don’t understand. Annie is such a pretty girl.” Then MTV got the video and it just went mad. It didn’t look like anything else. Annie’s hair was so different, and the colors in the video looked amazing. It was shot on 16mm film, but it was very rich. It became a phenomenon.

It’s not mentioned in the book, but I’d like to think that the ending was inspired by the ending of Jacques Rivette’s film, Celine And Julie Go Boating (1974).

Celine And Julie Go Boating (1974, dir. Jacques Rivette)

After that, Lennox is shown waking up in bed with a book on her nightstand with the same title as the song. It goes to black when she turns off the light.

Celine And Julie Go Boating cuts back to the beginning of the film where Celine wakes up, and she and Julie have now switched places. It’s Celine who ends up following Julie after she drops a book in a park. Before, it was Julie who followed Celine after she dropped something in the same park.

If Going Back To Cali by LL Cool J was inspired by the likes of Godard, Chabrol, and Antonioni, then it’s not a stretch to think that Stewart saw that movie, and thought to mimic that shot which shoots us out of the film to simply repeat the same movie with the characters switched. Much like you can imagine that Lennox is going to sleep to end up back in the same dream she just had, based on what she read in the book–the cover appearing to show one Annie reaching out to touch another Annie.

Chris Ashbrook produced the video.

Enjoy! And for all of us who have misheard lyrics at one time or another: Sweet dreams are made of cheese. Who am I to disagree?

30 Days Of Surrealism:

Music Video of the Day: Blue Monday 88 by New Order (1988, dir. Robert Breer & William Wegman)

Posted on August 29, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

I turned on this video in order to write about it for Monday, but became so hypnotized by its imagery that I couldn’t write till today.

I felt it was critically important to watch several forgotten early-90s thrillers in order to write about this video.

I felt it was better that Lisa do it because of Tobe Hooper’s passing.

Or I’ve been having difficulty eating and sleeping, which really caught up with me on Sunday afternoon.

Unfortunately, it’s the fourth one, and it’s still going on as I write this, so I may be in and out for awhile. We shall see.

Anyways, Lisa jumped in yesterday and spotlighted the one music video I’m aware of that was directed by Tobe Hooper–Dancing With Myself by Billy Idol.

If I had to wager a guess as to how he ended up directing that video, then I figure it probably went one of two ways:

He was a fan of Generation X (Idol’s band prior to going solo), and ended up getting in contact with Idol to film the video. Then he brought on the cinematographer who shot The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and did uncredited camerawork on The Funhouse (1981)–Daniel Pearl.
Or it went the other way, and prolific music-video cinematographer Daniel Pearl suggested they hire Tobe Hooper.

No matter what the reason, I’m sure Hooper and Pearl having collaborated before had something to do with it.

How they ended up shooting it on a set from a production of Ann Jellicoe’s punk rock-themed play The Sport Of Mad Mad Mother is a mystery to me.

Something else that’s a mystery to me, is how and why there are at least four different music videos for Blue Monday made in 1983, 1984, 1988, and 1995. Not versions of the song. Actual videos made for those different versions. No, I am not going to try and track them all down right now.

I could embed an okay-at-best cover version of this song that was done by HEALTH for the movie Atomic Blonde (2017) to try and tie it to something recent, but I’d prefer to embed the video of Orkestra Obsolete playing Blue Monday using nothing but instruments from the 1930s. I find that much more interesting, and by doing so, I won’t be lying by implying that movie is the reason I’m doing this video.

For me, the dog is the biggest selling point of this video.

I’m not sure if I want to know how it got so good at balancing.

The dog’s name is Fay Ray. Not only can this dog balance on a chair that is balanced on another chair, but she was able to catch the tennis ball her mouth.

Lead-singer Bernard Sumner couldn’t do it.

Yes, I’m sure they pulled it away at the last second. Nevertheless, it did appear to nearly hit Gilbert, so there seems to have been a fair amount of randomness to that part of the video. I’m kinda disappointed that he didn’t snatch it out of the air with his mouth.

Director and photographer William Wegman owned Fay Ray along with three other dogs named Batty, Chundo, and Crooky. They would all go on to teach kids the alphabet in 1995’s Alphabet Soup.

Wegman did sketches for the video, and the other director, Robert Breer, is the one who did the hand-drawn animation.

While I’m not sure I want to know about the training Fay Ray went through, I am curious as to what Gillian Gilbert is looking at in this shot.

The only other thing I have to say about this video is that I am completely perplexed as to why it appears to be comparing the dogs ability to balance with her ability to balance.

Maybe you’ll have better luck figuring out the video than me.

Maybe you’ve read Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut–where they got the title from.

Or maybe you’ll just sit back and enjoy it as I do.

Information on the song, and it being re-invented over and over is easy to find on Wikipedia and Songfacts.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Dancing With Myself by Billy Idol (1983, dir by Tobe Hooper)

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi! Lisa here, filling in for Val, with today’s music video of the day!

On Saturday night, fans of both film and horror were saddened to learn of the death of Tobe Hooper. Tobe Hooper was a Texas original, a fiercely iconoclastic director who totally changed the face of horror when he directed a low-budget shocker called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

When it came time to pick today’s music video of the day, I decided to see if Tobe Hooper had ever directed a music video. It turned out that he directed exactly one and here it is:

According to almost everyone online, Dancing With Myself is a song about masturbation. However, Idol himself says that the song’s lyrics are actually meant to be quite literal. The song actually is about dancing with yourself. Here’s how it’s explained over on Songfacts:

“This song is commonly thought to be about masturbation, but it’s really more about dancing by yourself. Billy got the idea after watching Japanese kids at a Tokyo disco “dancing with themselves” in a nightclub. The kids would dance in a pogo style up and down, and there were mirrors in the club so they could watch themselves doing it… This song is about more than just dancing. Idol told Rolling Stone: “The song really is about people being in a disenfranchised world where they’re left bereft, dancing with their own reflections.”

As for how Tobe Hooper came to direct the video … well, I have no idea. I imagine he was hired because of his fame as the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This video came out a year after the original Poltergeist, a film that Hooper is credited with directing but which many people believed was actually directed by producer Steven Spielberg. (Poltergeist was a huge hit but the rumors of Hooper being a director-in-name-only permanently and unfairly damaged Hooper’s reputation.) As far as I know, this is the only music video that Tobe Hooper directed.

As for the video, it features neither masturbation nor Japanese nightclubs. Instead, it appears to be taking place in a post-apocalyptic setting. The beginning of the video reminds me a bit of Hooper’s underrated slasher film, The Funhouse.

Anyway, enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: The Loco-Motion by Kylie Minogue (1988, dir. Chris Langham)

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

The 1987 version.

This is the 1988 version. After the song did well in Australia, the record company PWL re-recorded it for a 1988 release. This included both altering the original 1987 video, and removing things to make the cover more straight-forward. It sounds like an update of the 1962 Little Eva version, whereas the 1987 version took more creative license with it. I’m assuming that’s also why they changed the title from Locomotion back to The Loco-Motion.

I’d like to add that according to Wikipedia, the 1987 video was filmed at Essendon Airport and the ABC studios in Melbourne, Australia. Wikipedia goes on to say that this version of the video was created from the original 1987 version. I’m still leaving Chris Langham as the director, but it does seem to imply that there was someone else who came in to re-edit the video.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Locomotion by Kylie Minogue (1987, dir. Chris Langham)

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

It can’t ever be simple, can it?

There’s either different versions, different edits, and sometimes censored and uncensored versions of a video. Err….

Anyhow, there are two different versions of the video for Minogue’s cover of The Loco-Motion. This is the video that was done for the original 1987 release. The differences between the two videos are enough that I want to post them separately.

The song is different. It’s more danceable in this version, than in the 1988 version. It also goes by Locomotion instead of The Loco-Motion.

If you play the two videos side-by-side, then you’ll notice they go out of sync almost immediately. They seem to be composed of mostly the same footage, but edited together differently, with a few parts I didn’t see in both.

A small example is when Kylie knocks the widescreen back to fullscreen. In this version it only happens once. In the other version it happens twice, back-to-back.

Thank you, Kylie Minogue and anyone else who helped to make the following video on her official YouTube page:

Without that retrospective, I wasn’t positive this version was officially made. There’s plenty of videos out there that have had the sound replaced and/or the video altered. Thanks to that video, I know that this is official.

I wasn’t sure about the director. Chris Langham is credited with doing seven of her videos. They are all from 1988-1989. He could have simply re-edited that earlier version. I don’t think he did though because Wikipedia lists him as having directed the 1987 version of the video for I Should Be So Lucky. That’s good enough for me.

The video itself is a mix of Minogue in music-video, behind-the-scenes, and studio-recording mode.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Hang On Sloopy by Rick Derringer (1975, dir. ???)

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

Yes, I am aware of some of Rick Derringer’s recent exploits–in real life and on Wikipedia (article | talk page | edit history). I didn’t know about them until I started looking into this video. If I were to take that kind of thing into account on every video I spotlighted, then I would be unable to do these posts at all.

That being said, I would be fascinated to find out how Derringer supposedly carries a gun on a plane 30-50 times a year. That sounds like Kevin Mitnick territory, where he should help the airlines to close up the gaps in their security that allowed that to happen.

The only reason I even came across this stuff was because I was trying to confirm something that a bunch a people have been trying to figure out about this video:

Who is the girl?

There seems to be two theories:

It’s Derringer’s wife. That seems to have been dismissed as a myth.
It’s Liz Brewer. This appears to be the most reputable theory. She did hang out with rockers, including Jimi Hendrix, back in the day. Today she writes about etiquette.

As for the date, I came up with 1975 based on two things:

It’s in color. I know this doesn’t automatically rule out the 60s, but it was a good indicator that this wasn’t done for The McCoys original 1965 release.
The song was re-released in 1975 on a best-of-Rick Derringer album.

Enjoy the song and video. And unless you have to, don’t go don’t the Wikipedia-talk-pages rathole.

Music Video of the Day: I Can Dream About You by Dan Hartman (1984, dir. ???)

Posted on August 24, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

Sorry if this is short, but I’ve spent the past week watching all 65 episodes of Jem, so that I could properly “enjoy” the 2015 live-action adaptation.

Short version: The movie is awful.

Long version: Fans of the series are going to be incredibly disappointed because huge things are taken out, and many things are gutted. They won’t like it.

People who aren’t fans of the series are not going to like it either. It tries to graft elements of a show that would require quite a lot of money to do with special effects as well as more shooting time. The movie is very low budget. As a result, those things will only confuse this audience. It also causes the movie to make huge leaps, plot and character-wise. It’s always nice when a character talks about a bunch of time that has passed when we just saw it a few minutes ago.

The movie is for no one.

On the series, Jerrica created the alternate identity of Jem because she was clever business-wise, and used the money to fund a home for foster girls.

In the movie, Jerrica gets noticed on YouTube and becomes an overnight success that is taken advantage of, but ends up coming out on top.

Funny enough, that kind of has to do with this music video.

Back in 1984, a movie called Streets Of Fire was released. They wanted Hartman to do a song for it, so he gave them I Can Dream About You. They were going to have someone else sing it, and have a fictional group called The Sorels, lip-sync it in the movie.

Hartman told them that they could do that so long as if they ever decided to release the song as a single or on the soundtrack, that they would use his voice. They did just that, and the song did very well. It helped make him an overnight success, even though he had been around since the early-70s.

That brings us to the video.

Our avatar into the video is a woman played by Joyce Hyser. You remember her, right? She played the lead in Just One Of The Guys (1985).

Just One Of The Guys (1985, dir. Lisa Gottlieb)

You know, part one of the crossdressing trilogy.

That isn’t a thing? Darn you, IMDb! You are usually so perfect.

It was also refaked in 2006 as She’s The Man. A movie insultingly inferior to the original.

She enters the bar and puts the the section of the film where The Sorels are sining the song on a jukebox. This sets us in the mindset of someone watching the movie. They think that The Sorels are really singing the song.

Slowly but surely she begins to realize that while their performance is excellent, the song is actually coming from the nondescript bartender.

In the end, we get a really clever bit. We keep cutting back to The Sorels, which reminds us why they were in the movie. Then Hartman gets up on the bar, and does a lame little dance that is nothing next to what the actors are doing that are playing The Sorels. It doesn’t matter though, because you are now seeing and hearing the person who wrote the song. Despite his performance abilities, they are his words, and are being sung with his voice.

It’s a nice little condensed way of starting the audience with the performance from the film that they are familiar with, and slowly inching us over to the person behind The Sorels.

They shot the video at the Hard Rock in London.

Technically, the version performed in the movie was sung by a guy named Winston Ford. But you get the idea.

If you want to hear the other version, then you can either watch the movie, or the other video that I swear doesn’t use Hartman’s voice. It’s close, but doesn’t sound like it matches up exactly. It is the one that uses the performance from the film, with some other footage from the movie cut into it.

Only ten years after this, Hartman died of an AIDS-related brain tumor at the age of 43.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Milk From The Coconut by Toto Coelo/Total Coelo (1983, dir. Philip Davey)

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

If I have to break out a music video by Toto Coelo, then it’s a pretty safe bet that I don’t feel well, or have had a long day. Today is an example of both.

The beauty of doing this particular Toto Coelo video is that I can quote my post on the video for their song, I Eat Cannibals:

I don’t have a lot of guilty pleasures in the realm of music. I will usually defend just about anything that I enjoy. A good example of that is Debbie Gibson. Still, if I had to list one band that could qualify, then it would be Toto Coelo (or Total Coelo as they were renamed to in the US). I’m guessing they renamed the band in America so as not to confuse people into thinking they had something to do with the band Toto.

This seems to have been their only hit song. But they did a couple of music videos for other fun songs like Milk From The Coconut, which was supposed to be in the unfinished sequel to Grizzly that had them in it. They also did one called Dracula’s Tango (Sucker For Your Love). They’re all stupid, but fun. Just like this music video. I’m pretty sure Milk From The Coconut was supposed to be taken seriously. However, it’s tough to do so after you’ve seen them sing it on the stage in Grizzly II.

How do I describe the video for Milk From The Coconut? Oh, yeah. It’s easy. It’s a less serious, danceable version of Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday.

We have the uncomfortable dinner scene.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

We have the scene where he is less than subtle about judging her because of the way she looks.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

The scene where we see her trying to conform to some sort of ideal image.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

We also get an ending that has the band going back behind the images of themselves that they broke out of at the beginning. In Voices Carry, we get the image of her trapped behind a translucent material that barely lets us see her. She doesn’t break free till the ending at the opera house.

Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday (1984)

Where Milk From The Coconut makes up for the absence of seeing the abuse boyfriend, is with these shots.

What happened here? Is that meant to imply that she was sexually assaulted as child? I would assume it’s just a loss of innocence from age, but not in conjunction with other images in this video.

The big difference between the two videos is that you can take Voices Carry seriously. This comes across as sad when you try to pay attention to it. Of course it’s difficult to do so when it’s brought to you by the same group that did I Eat Cannibals. And is still performed the way it is, with things that couch the impact of the lyrics and certain parts of the video.

It’s still one of my favorite songs that they did, and I appreciate them appearing to trying do something less frothy.

Enjoy!