I don’t know if David Lynch still does this, but at least for awhile, he held music video competitions for his songs. That is the case with this music video. The following people worked on it according to the officially posted video:
Director: Tamar Drachli
Actors: Adam Horowitz & Vaan Nguyen
Director of Photography: Tom Goldwasser & Nadav Gordon
Camera Operator: Tom Goldwasser
Costumes Designer: Leeat Ramon
Compositing: Roi Werner
Online: Shahar Naor
It goes on to give some background on the competition:
“Almost 450 were entered into the competition to create the official music videos for David Lynch’s single ‘Good Day Today / I Know’m released on Sunday Best Recordings http://www.sundaybest.net
This fantastic video directd by Tamar Drachli was chosen by David Lynch as the winner for ‘I Know’ from a shortlist of 10 finalists.
The response to this competition was amazing with almost 450 videos published and some fantastic creativity and talent on display.”
That’s a lot of music videos to go through.
Based on what little I can turn up, the cast and crew are from Israel, or at least have connections there (the taxi has Hebrew characters on it). The one that stood out the most is Vaan Nguyen. The reason is because there is a whole movie about her father called The Journey of Vaan Nguyen (2005). I haven’t seen it myself.
This is the second music video for Lights by Interpol. It was made a year after the Charlie White one in 2010. That one looks more like an induction into the cenobites. This one looks like a guy repeatedly pressing an emergency button, which may or may not have sexual connotations. That’s all I can give you.
I’m going to need a little help, and even then, I can only tell you what I see. Here is what Wikipedia says about the video:
“The music video for the song, directed and animated by David Lynch, was released on April 14, 2009 on Pitchfork.tv. The video contains crude drawings of various objects and landscapes, such as cityscapes and factories. The music video’s plot follows a man, whose lover is a woman’s head. An unknown person shoots the man in the back of the head, murdering him. The woman’s head jumps on the killer and murders him. The video concludes with drawings of the night sky as the video fades to black.”
I see us being introduced to a dirty and dank city before we enter an apartment where a man enters from the bottom of the screen–jiggling while he does it. Why is he jiggling? I thought of masturbating at first, but after watching the video a few more times, it feels more like anticipation then anything else. Then a floating head come up, reaches him, and disembodies one of his arms when it cuts outside.
That’s followed by an arm holding a gun that comes in and fires a shot at the man’s head. It’s ambiguous as to whether it actually blows his head off or not with that shot. I believe that was the intention because you do see her head appear right over his. However, you also don’t see it travel around his head. That’s immediately followed by–we assume–the killer leaving the building. We have to assume it is the killer seeing as she’s a head and we have no real reason to believe he isn’t dead–at least dead in his head.
More city follows before cutting to a shot that looks like it’s from Rabbits (2002). It also looks like a guy with a missing head that is smoking off the top of it. We then see what I believe to be the American flag in the background underneath all the black lines. You could also see it simply as stars in the night sky. Smog travels across it before we cut to a guy walking.
Then what looks like the guy from the beginning, minus the top of his head, appears to be looking at us while the flag continues to wave in the background. Then the man dives down to the bottom of the screen. Note that depending on how you look at that shot, it can be seen as her diving downwards where his head would be.
After her head flies across the city, we see his disembodied hand pass over the flag.
Feel free to interpret it as you please. It’s Lynch after all.
What a mess it is trying to narrow down David Lynch music videos. If it isn’t undocumented, then it’s mis-credited to Lynch.
BlueBOB was a group composed of John Neff and David Lynch. The video has Naomi Watts, David Lynch, and John Neff in it. It also has Eli Roth. On that note, I’m not dignifying this with anymore than that. I will just include the remake of Cabin Fever if it were made by Dingo Pictures that Phelan Porteous and Allison Pregler put together for April Fools’ Day.
Take this one in now if you can, because if Wikipedia is to be believed, it “has never been released.”
I don’t know enough about X Japan to speak about them beyond that they are a Japanese heavy metal band with a tragic backstory that is documented in the film, We Are X (2016).
This particular song appears to have had three different versions made of it. This is the third one whose music video was recorded in Los Angeles and shot at Coyote Dry Lake in San Bernardino County, California.
Wikipedia says that Lynch also shot a commercial for the song shot on a beach in Malibu. To the best of my knowledge, the video below is that ad.
This is as good a place as any to mention that Lynch has had a career in commercials. My personal favorites are his own versions of the Taster’s Choice commercials, but in the Twin Peaks universe, with some of the actors from the show. I have included a collection of his commercials below, which includes the coffee ones.
Seeing as the site is going through each episode of Twin Peaks, I thought I might as well go through the music videos where David Lynch has been directly involved. I say “directly” because there is a music video from 1982 for a song called I Predict, by the group Sparks, which is often credited to David Lynch, even though everything I’ve seen says it was directed by Douglas Martin in the style of David Lynch.
There’s another video for Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack that is credited to Lynch over on mvdbase, but probably only got that way because the stedicam operator on the video, Dan Kneece, worked on Blue Velvet (1986). He also worked on other David Lynch stuff, including 29 of the 30 episodes of Twin Peaks’ original run. Wikipedia says it was directed by Baillie Walsh.
We all know the other version of Wicked Game. I’ll do that someday. This is the version that intercuts footage from Wild At Heart (1990) with Isaak’s performance. What is there to say? It’s in Lynch black-and-white. It has a flame. It has Chris Isaak looking like Henry Spencer from Eraserhead (1977) if he were a young Roy Orbison, which I’m sure is on purpose since Orbison’s In Dreams is prominently featured in Blue Velvet. It’s probably what most people would expect.
One last thing, Lynch is again credited for a music video that I don’t think he did. He is credited for directing Dangerous by Michael Jackson. I have no reason to believe that’s true. However, both the video below and IMDb do credit him with directing a short teaser for the album called Dangerous.
For completions sake, here is the other version of Young Turks by Rod Stewart. This is the rooftop performance that, according to Wikipedia, was aired about one-third of the way through Dick Clark’s three-hour American Bandstand 30th Anniversary Special Episode on October 30th, 1981.
You can see the part of the episode with the performance by Stewart below, which includes an introduction by Dick Clark.
It was practically a given that I was going be doing a Rick Astley music video today. I only considered doing Never Gonna Give You Up by Musical Youth for brief moment. That’ll have to wait for another day.
As you may or may not know, Rick Astley is making a comeback with his album called 50. The second single off of the album is for Angels On My Side. Oh, Rick. You sly devil. That also goes for everyone who worked on this video.
The video starts off, and we see that Rick Astley has been brought to a shipping yard to be executed by Guy Ritchie gangsters. But while they thought they were bringing Rick to a place of death, they were really taking him to a place of salvation. In other words, the gangsters have been rickrolled.
That salvation comes in the form of The Angels who emerge from a shipping container.
That’s when we find out what Rick has been up to behind-the-scenes all these years.
That’s right. Rick has successfully combined the backup dancers from Together Forever…
Together Forever by Rick Astley
with the T-Birds.
Grease (1978, dir. Randal Kleiser)
That, or director Michael Baldwin hired dance troupe Sparkle Motion, and Marianne Machin choreographed them. However, the connections between this, Together Forever, and Grease (1978) were clearly intentional.
The most obvious is that The Angels are with Rick forever–being angels and all.
There’s the kiss.
Together Forever by Rick Astley
When you watch both videos, you’ll notice that she and Rick raise their eyebrows when they are kissed. In his case, they snuck up on him. In her case, she points to her cheek where she expects a kiss.
In the dancing you can see everything tied together when The Angles do this:
It would just be a standard dance move, but they happen to do the same thing at the end of Grease when they are singing We Go Together.
Grease (1978, dir. Randal Kleiser)
This is one of the few music videos I’ve ever seen that has credits at the end.
I would say “proper credits”, but I don’t see one for Rick Astley’s car in there. No really, that’s his actual car. Thanks to Michael Baldwin over on Promo News, we get several bits of behind-the-scenes information.
“One utterly remote dusty location, seven kooky dancers, two dangerous actors, several cold pizzas, no easy toilet access and looming sunstroke. That’s the glamour of music videos in 2016.”
“Despite the odds, it was a brilliant day and Rick was an absolute delight. We even used his car as a prop, which was completely covered in dirt by the time we all waved him off at the end of the day. I’d worked with the dancers, Sparkle Motion, before but always wanted to make something that featured them a lot more. And along came this perfect opportunity. Damn, I love those girls and Marianne, who came up with the routine, is an absolute legend. A real angel, even….”
They didn’t stop with the actual music video when it came to being clever. Take a look at the behind-the-scenes video below because you will see Rick get rickrolled by his own song while trying to talk about the video, and they never cut back to him to finish explaining it.
We do find out, before Rick is interrupted by Rick, that this was shot in Essex, UK.
There’s one last thing to notice. As Rick is walking away from the scene, The Angles pop in and out as the camera cuts.
I don’t know if that was intentional or not. It could have been since The Angels are otherwise invisible. Given when they are shown, I’m leaning towards that it was done on purpose.
At first, I honestly thought this was another version of Fernando. It’s actually the Spanish version of I Have A Dream. I can find music videos for Connie Talbot’s cover version and Westlife’s cover version, but not ABBA’s English version. There is a listing for it. I just can’t track it down right now. The best I can find is a live version. Maybe that’s why this is up on ABBA’s official VEVO channel. It’s better than not having any version available.
I thought this was a Spanish version of Fernando because the video is basically the same. You have the group sitting around in an intimate setting singing a low-key song. How I mistook the song itself, I have no idea. Since I can’t find an English version, I have no basis for comparison between the two videos. Still, I think this is exactly how I would want that version to look as well. The song lends itself well to something that is stripped down and involves nothing fancy.
Through the Shattered Lens 