I can’t disagree with Bo Diddley. He was in Rockula (1990) after all. Then again, Toni Basil and Thomas Dolby were in it too, so he was in good company.
As far as I know, this is the only music video that Bo Diddley ever did. Those are The Shirelles singing backup vocals. I like that Bo Diddley didn’t do the typical old musician music video. You know, those videos that show some 20-40 year-olds acting out the meaning of the lyrics with occasional cutaways to the older musicians. Bo Diddley is right up front and as nutty as ever. I love the color scheme too. This would have been right at home with the bright color music videos of the mid-1990s. I also appreciate the little history lesson with the old photos of Bo and the Apollo Theater.
Yes, I did notice Diddley’s square guitar fly between the Twin Towers. It’s hard to miss.
This music video was directed and edited by Simeon Soffer. He did the same for about 15 other videos. This doesn’t happen often when I do these posts, but Soffer went on to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subjects for the film The Wildest Show In The South: The Angola Prison Rodeo (1999).
This was produced by Mike Alfieri. I can’t find any other work he has done.
Since I did acid jazz yesterday, I thought it was a little too on the nose to follow that with George Clinton or A Tribe Called Quest, so instead I thought of Earth, Wind & Fire.
According to Wikipedia, this was the first music video to be played on BET’s show called Video Soul. It was created by Ron Hays using an analog computer animation system called Scanimate. It should come as no surprise that Hays would end up working on an Earth, Wind & Fire music video considering he also did the video effects for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), which had the group in it. He also worked on Grease (1978), Starcrash (1978), and Can’t Stop The Music (1980).
I figured that after doing a video from jazz fusion artist Herbie Hancock, I would follow that up with an acid jazz band. The Brand New Heavies get classified in other categories, but acid jazz is one of them. The video kind of reminds me of a cross between something I would expect from Deee-Lite and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. The band is still around today, and released a new music video at least as recent as 2013.
I of course knew about Rockit. However, I had no idea that Hancock made any other music videos. I’m so glad he did. What’s even better is that he did this one with Godley & Creme like he did for Rockit. That’s a triple whammy that, at the very least, is guaranteed to make something interesting.
I don’t think there’s much to say here. I distinctly remember when the music video came out two years later for the song Riding With The King. This one went under my radar. According to mvdbase, B.B. King actually made three music videos back in the mid-80s under the direction of John Landis. This music video is sad, which is appropriate since the song is too. I also like that they paired King with Chapman considering one of her most famous songs is Give Me One Reason, which she would later go on to do as a duet with Eric Clapton for the A Very Special Christmas Live album. Clapton having done Riding With The King with B.B. King. It all connects together.
The last thing I want to mention is that B.B. King didn’t originally do this song. It was written by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell in 1951. I have embedded Hawkins’ version below as a way to work him in even though he never did a music video to my knowledge.
The video was directed by Thom Oliphant. He appears to have done around 30 music videos. He went on to produce and direct a lot CMT specials.
Giles Dunning shot the video. He has shot around 35 music videos and directed 2 of them. He went on to do some music and TV work after this video such as for the LCD Soundsystem concert film Shut Up And Play The Hits (2012). But, you’ve probably seen his camerawork that he did prior to this video. He worked on A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), Pet Sematary (1989), A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989), Ghoulies Go To College (1991), Critters 3 (1991), Critters 4 (1992), and for some non-horror ones, he also worked on Pump Up The Volume (1990) and A River Runs Through It (1992). Oh, and he also worked on Rockula (1990) since I apparently am unable to escape that movie since I reviewed it during October of 2015.
Sorry I didn’t get this post up yesterday. I stupidly set the computer I realistically can only do these posts from to perform an all day and all night task that was both CPU and I/O intensive on Sunday. The last time I tried to interrupt it while doing something like that to do just about anything, the computer glitched out to you-need-to-restart-me levels. I was going to let it go. Of course, Lisa noticed, and jumped into action. I think a thank you goes without saying, but thank you nonetheless.
Okay, so it’s Black History Month. I already did Funkadelic last week. I hope to get in a variety of black artists this month. If I can, I am going to try to do one from all sorts of different genres, along with a few legends that I can find made it into some music videos despite their age. Doing nothing but rap would kind of miss the point of the month. Unfortunately, I can’t find a music video from country artist Charley Pride. Maybe I’ll find a way of sneaking him in anyways as a bonus on another post.
Up till now, I have hit Beastie Boys, N.W.A., and Run-D.M.C. That leaves me with just Public Enemy and Salt-N-Pepa in order to really hit the major groups of what I call the second-wave of post Rapper’s Delight rappers. The very first rap song I remember memorizing was Shoop. I learned it while I was in elementary school, and would have the lyrics playing on an endless loop in my head. Which of course is why I am not doing Shoop, but Push It instead.
The first thing I want to get out of the way is that director Ted Demme is the nephew of Jonathan Demme. This video is Demme’s first music video after starting Yo! MTV Raps, according to a quote from editor Glen Lazzaro on mvdbase.
Now lets get to the obvious. Salt-N-Pepa are known for songs about sex. In 1991 they would do a music video for their song Let’s Talk About Sex and would even follow that up a year later with the song called Let’s Talk About AIDS. That makes the GEICO commercial they did using this song especially perfect and extra hilarious. This early song talking about sex would, without changing anything, become a song about pushing one of the possibilities of sex back out of what this song was talking about putting something into. You have to love that. In fact, Let’s Talk About Sex brings up the possibility of pregnancy if you don’t practice safe sex, so it fits that they would be singing this song in a birthing class at one point.
According to mvdbase, this video was recorded live. It’s a pretty standard stage performance all things considered. You can tell that Demme, like his brother, knew the artists he was filming, and catered it to their style. There’s a little Easter Egg in here. At about 3 minutes and 9 seconds, you can see that they tilted the frame upwards toward the right.
Tom Demme would go on to direct a couple other feature films before passing away in 2002 at the age of 38.
James Neihouse was the assistant cameraman on this and at least two other music videos. He has gone on to do a fair amount of work as a cinematographer. It looks like a lot of them are documentaries such as those you would see on the Discovery Channel.
Glenn Lazzaro has done some work outside of music videos, but they seem to have been his primary thing. He has edited somewhere between 75 and 80 music videos. Not small ones either. We’ll see his work again. In fact, I guarantee we’ll see his work again come March Madness.
Normally, this is Val’s feature but she’s currently in recovery after overdosing on Abba-related videos and attempting to watch Rob Zombie’s Halloween, all in the same night. So, I’m going to take this opportunity to toss in a music video from my favorite Canadian band, Jakalope!
(Jakalope was not only heavily featured on Degrassi but they even did a version of that show’s timeless theme song.)
From their debut album, It Dreams, here is Go Away!
The video for Go Away continues the story that was started in the video for Feel It. Both videos were directed by Lisa Mann.
It Dreams was produced by Trent Reznor and his also one of the five writers credited for this song. His influence certainly is felt, in both the song and the video!
This is the last of the pre-ABBA music videos. There are a couple more with Agnetha and one with Björn, but they don’t sing, so I am excluding them for the sake of my own sanity.
Phew! There is one last thing to bring up. While Benny was in The Hep Stars, before going on to ABBA, Björn was in a group called Hootenanny Singers. I found a video that you could technically break-up into separate music videos, but this is a whole special with narration between the songs. To me this crosses into A Hard Day’s Night (1964) territory. Nevertheless, I have embedded the video below if you want to hear some of their songs. Yes, it does have the song Baby Those Are The Rules, which I am sure Björn would rather you forget was ever a thing. But, it does give you some nice shots of Björn circa 1966.
Well, we can add Funkadelic to the list of groups that made groundbreaking music videos in 1970s. We’ve had numerous ones from ABBA doing all sorts of stuff. We had AC/DC taking what would otherwise be a simple stage performance and making it feeling intimate. We had Hall & Oates making the anti-video. We had Alice Cooper foreshadowing all kinds of things that would become staples of music videos, but most notably, the quick editing. Now we have Funkadelic, before becoming part of Parliament-Funkadelic, also doing location shooting and integrating the filmmaking into the song the way Elected by Alice Cooper did. Whereas that one called for a lot of quick cuts, this song lends itself to more laid back long takes. Also like Elected, they aren’t performing the song. You do see a couple of them with instruments, but it doesn’t seem into tie to the song you are hearing. The instruments are just there. The focus is on the trippy visuals. I can’t help but look at it and think: “Funkadelic Takes NYC”. I have to imagine this was fun to film.
Through the Shattered Lens 