Today’s music video is Elektrobank by The Chemical Brothers and it just happens to go along perfectly with my current series of Back To School reviews!
This video takes place at a high school gymnastics competition and it stars none other than one of my favorite directors, Sofia Coppola! Well, actually, if you want to get technical, some of the video’s best moments features Sofia’s stunt double. But still, she gives a great performance.
This video was directed by the great Spike Jonze, Sofia’s future (ex) husband.
Val is usually the one who does our music video of the day feature but she’s taking a few very deserved and well-earned days off so, for the next few days, I’m going to be filling in for her!
So, I figured I’d start things off with this 2002 video of No Doubt’s Hella Good! There’s no big reason behind why I decided to go with this video, beyond the fact that I really love the song and it was directed by one of my favorite filmmakers, Mark Romanek! This was filmed over three days in Long Beach, California and Romanek based it on a Vogue fashion shoot from the 1990s, one that featured the models on wave runners!
As for me, I’m feeling hella good so let’s just keep on dancing…
As a kid, this music video was simple and uplifting. It’s about a little girl who is laughed off stage because she is dressed like a bee and can’t really dance. She wanders around meeting more and more people who don’t really understand her. Then after reaching her lowest, she finds a place with others like herself. Recently I read a comment on the music video. There is another way you can think of it.
A little girl is laughed off stage because she is dressed like a bee and can’t really dance. She wanders around meeting more and more people who don’t understand. Then after reaching her lowest, she finds peace in killing herself. She opens a pair of heavenly gates with other people in an Elysian field like place that is filled with other people the world rejected to the point where they severed their ties with the harsh world as the music video depicts.
Personally, I think it is a bit of both. It is meant to be uplifting in that it does show the little girl eventually finding a place filled with people who accept her for who she is. I also think it is a cautionary tale about how people who are different from some sort of non-existent norm can be so marginalized by the world that they are pushed to an extreme limit where we lose them. They may find a wonderful place where they are with others of their kind, but what makes them unique leaves the world devoid of what they had to offer.
The fact that lead singer Shannon Hoon died three years later of a cocaine overdose lends credence to this interpretation. The timing of the lyrics and the lyrics themselves also point towards this as well. It’s bittersweet.
Samuel Bayer of Smells Like Teen Spirit directed the video.
Heather DeLoach played the little girl. She has done a handful of things over the years such as Camp Nowhere (1994) and The Beautician and the Beast (1997).
Jeremy Stuart edited the music video. He did a handful of music videos. I couldn’t find an entry on IMDb for him seeing as his name is rather generic.
I think this music video can speak for itself, and doesn’t need my help.
I will bring up the crew though.
Director Edd Griles did some of Lauper’s most famous music videos including Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. He was also the executive producer on this one.
Roz Block was a producer on this video. This seems to be the only video Block did.
Mike Negrin shot the video. He seems to have worked primarily on Billy Joel videos, but did a few others as well. Since then, he has mainly done television, which included shooting The Spirit of Christmas (2015) that Lisa reviewed last year.
If you look closely then you’ll see wrestler “Captain” Lou Albano who played her father in the music video for Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I’ll bet Catrine Dominique who played her mom in that video is in here somewhere too, but I’m not 100% sure.
It’s my birthday today so I chose to spotlight Goody Two Shoes by Adam Ant. Among other ties to the song, I too am a goody two shoes. It also happens to fall in line with the last two music videos I did as something that is so much fun to sing along to while you watch it.
One of the most interesting things to me about this video is the use of repeated actions throughout it. It matches the lyrics and title, but it also fits with theories I have read for why temporal overlaps exist in early films. They say that perhaps it wasn’t a mistake, but a double your pleasure, double your fun thing. I know I enjoy seeing Adam dive across the table, then multiple times across the bed with actor Caroline Munro lying in it.
Munro has been in numerous things, but is probably best known for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Of course all things are connected, so it turns out actor and music video director Daniel Kleinman who is this video also happened to direct the music video for Sheryl Crow’s song for the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) made two decades later.
We also get a cameo from the Jailhouse Rock (1957) set and a clever use of a mirror, which doubles the image. The Jailhouse Rock set can also double as a copy of every set used in an early cinema film called Peeping Tom that was remade endless times. The butler even turns out to be a peeping tom. We also get an iris shot of Adam that is repeated with the shot through the keyhole near the end.
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff going on in this video.
Since it is my birthday, let’s amp it up, and triple our fun with two more performances/music videos for Goody Two Shoes.
For whatever reason, I happened to pick out two fun music videos in a row well in advance. I have up to the beginning of November already planned out.
This is a song like Walking On Sunshine by Katrina And The Waves that probably everyone has heard before. It’s a simple video filled with video effects and plenty of sexual innuendo filling the screen. The band even had some controversy over a picture of the lead singer given her age at the time it was taken. There is a rather suggestive photo of her floating in the water at the beginning and end of the video. Just like I Know What Boys Like by The Waitresses and Centerfold by J. Geils Band, I hope you just have fun listening to it as I am while writing this post.
Steve Kahn directed the music video. He did only a couple of other music videos, but there is still something noteworthy. I Want Candy was in between a video for Lou Reed’s Women and Bad Manner’s My Girl Lollipop (My Boy Lollipop). I haven’t heard them yet, but it is interesting that all three music videos were done in a row given the titles.
Seeing as the last two music videos we did were quite serious–Jeremy by Pearl Jam and Runaway Train by Soul Asylum–I thought we’d go with one that is just fun. I am not really going to talk about it except to bring up one sad thing and the director.
The sad thing is that this video starts with lead singer Patty Donahue smoking. What is sad about that is she died of cancer on December 9th, 1996. I don’t know if it was lung cancer or not, but it is a shame that her wonderful deadpan vocal delivery is no longer with us.
The director of the video is Ken Walz. He did several music videos in various positions including writing, producing, and directing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun for Cyndi Lauper. He also directed Time After Time for Lauper.
Might as well do this music video now. There’s no “good” time to do it. I never thought too much about the music video till now. It’s montage/collage shots of a kid who obviously has a very unhappy life played by Trevor Wilson. Eddie Vedder stands around as the narrator for the boy’s story. Finally, we have the ending where the kid goes and kills himself in front of the class as clearly shown by the kids holding up their arms to protect themselves from the splashes of blood.
That is what the video is about, but not what some people think it is about. Some people think it is about a kid who brought a gun to school, then shot his fellow students. Others have even tried to use this video as a scapegoat for their actions. I remember once reading about some people who were blaming their actions on The Matrix. Might as well give it a try. People sure ate it up in the 80s when people would blame Satan and Heavy Metal. So why not blame this music video for your actions? I won’t link to it here, but I have come across a site in the past that even though it acknowledges what Ozzy Osbourne’s song Suicide Solution is actually about, they still say they are sure kids have killed themselves a result.
Based on the Wikipedia article on this video, a lot of this nonsense seems to stem from real world school shootings. Enough. The song is about a kid who is so tortured by his life and the people around him that he sadly does what some people do. He kills himself, and in his case, does it in a manner that leaves a message for others. In the case of the story in this music video, it’s killing himself in front of all the kids who made fun of him while his home life was a personal hell, which the song talks about. In particular, the line about cleaning it from the blackboard. I have a feeling more people need to see Frederick Wiseman’s 1968 documentary called High School.
However, you can’t completely blame this on people misunderstanding the music video. The music video came in two stages. They filmed a prototype-like version of it before deciding to film the one above. Well, sort of the version above. The second version they filmed edited out the kid putting the gun in his mouth to commit suicide because of censorship restrictions. That’s why people looked at the kids afterwards and thought it represented them having been killed. Thanks, MTV!
With that out of the way, let me just say that I never particularly liked the music video. I love the song, but just like Smells Like Teen Spirit, it became annoying because it was overplayed. The music video has always been an example to me of why Pearl Jam shouldn’t have been making music videos at the time. Eddie Vedder looks ridiculous while trying to convey some very serious material. Still, it is another essential of the early 90s. It is devastating and heartbreaking. It is also a prime example of how editing–forced or not–without thinking can have serious consequences. It is also a prime example of how censorship can completely transform a work of art into something else for a portion of its’ audience.
You have to remember that this came out only a year or so after Jeremy by Pearl Jam and No Rain by Blind Melon. We also had America’s Most Wanted in full swing. The music video is partially made up of some scenes of the band playing mostly acoustic instruments while the lead singer does a better version of Eddie Vedder’s performance in Jeremy. The rest is made up of dramatizations of people running away/kidnapped, the consequences, and children’s pictures shown onscreen with their names and how long they have been missing.
The showing of actual missing kids led to some unintended results. It sounds like a good idea at first. I mean one of the members of Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony was found thanks to the TV Movie Adam (1983) that led to America’s Most Wanted, so why not? Well, if you hop over to the Wikipedia page, then you find out there were some bad things that happened as a result. In one case, the girl wasn’t actually missing, but had been killed and buried in the backyard by her mother. Another case was a girl who was forced back into a bad situation after having seen the music video. There are other details there too, such as the multiple versions of the music video with different kids in it. Some are still missing, while others have met unfortunate endings. It’s sad. Thankfully, according to the director, around 30 of the kids were found.
It is a classic both in song and video. It just also happens to be a sad case of the best of intentions turning sour for some.
If you haven’t seen it, then watch it. This music video premiering in September of 1991 was the 90s equivalent of The Beatles going on Ed Sullivan.
I’ve been a fan of Nirvana for a long time now, but I have never been a fan of this music video. According to Wikipedia, director Samuel Bayer figures he was hired because he would make a “not corporate” music video seeing as it was the first one he was hired to do and he felt his test reel was lousy. Also according to Wikipedia, the extras doing their thing wasn’t staged. They got pissed off sitting around all day, so Cobain and Bayer let them act out their frustration and filmed it. The janitor was played by Tony De La Rosa. The last shot of the close-up on Kurt’s face was his idea along with a few other edits he did for the final version that was shown on MTV. I’m glad he did seeing as I can’t think of anything more visually iconic about Nirvana than Kurt’s face screaming in close-up.
I like to imagine Nirvana performing at a high school like how it must have looked when Dead Kennedys performed at my old high school in 1982. Or, how it would have looked had they shown up in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary High School (1968).
High School (1968, dir. Frederick Wiseman)
There’s other information out there about the music video, but the important thing to know going into watching this is context. This was a major break visually and audibly from what was going on prior to the release of the album Nevermind.
Through the Shattered Lens 