Tag Archives: music video

Music Video of the Day: Weapon Of Choice by Fatboy Slim (2001, dir. Spike Jonze)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

Leaving this out of a week of music videos that feature dancing would be a crime. I could leave it at that, but let’s talk a little bit about this music video.

Much like the mid-90s swing revival seemed to come out of nowhere, so did this video. We were all familiar with Fatboy Slim’s Praise You whether we wanted to be or not at this time. They played that song to death. Then came Mr. Deer Hunter and Gold Watch up your butt Christopher Walken dancing around a hotel like he was suddenly possessed by the spirit of Fred Astaire. Leave it up to Spike Jonze to think this one up, or at least I assume he did. This is one of those music videos that we not only know the director and producers, but the cinematographer, choreographers, the production designer, the 2nd camera operator, costume and wardrobe, visual effects, stunts, and it apparently had a “Philosophical Consultant”.

The choreographers were Spike Jonze and Christopher Walken themselves, but also a Michael Rooney. His work can be seen from as far back as Saved by the Bell to this year’s The Jungle Book.

Of course you’ll recognize the 2nd camera operator. That being director Roman Coppola.

The cinematographer is Lance Acord. He worked on Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), etc.

The people you’ll recognize goes on.

Eric Zumbrunnen was the editor on this video a along with some notable videos such as Buddy Holly, Cannonball by The Breeders, and Sure Shot by Beastie Boys. He too would continue to work with Spike Jonze being the editor on Adaptation and Her (2013).

Producer Vincent Landay would continue to work with Jonze, but Deannie O’Neil doesn’t appeared to have done much of anything beyond this music video.

Production Designer Val Wilt would go on to do 96 episodes of Bones. Not bad.

Costume Designer Casey Storm would also go on to work for Spike Jonze and do Zodiac (2007) with David Fincher.

Visual effects person Ben Gibbs would work some more with Jonze, but I’m not sure about Jeff Kim.

As for the stunt people, Keith Campbell is one of those people who has done stunts on everything. Brian Friedman is apparently very well known as a dancer/choreographer on TV Shows. He also worked on several Britney Spears music videos.

The “Philosophical Consultant” K.K. Barrett worked with both Jonze and the Coppolas.

Wow! Now this is a well documented music video. This makes me happy. It also makes me happy watching Christopher Walken channel his inner Astaire. I love how Walken at first isn’t sure where the music is coming from and notices the little radio. Then he is overcome, and must dance. It’s true what Gloria Estefan said: “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You”.

This video is pure fun. It’s also funny that we got 70s cop shows for Beastie Boys, Happy Days for Weezer, 50s musicals for Björk, and then Walken doing a more expansive version of Fred Astaire’s number from 1951’s Royal Wedding.

Music Video of the Day: (She’s) Sexy & 17 by Stray Cats (1983, dir. Ian Leech)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

I remember back in the mid-90s catching an episode of Regis and Kathy, which my mom watched regularly. They had an unusual musical guest that day. It was Squirrel Nut Zippers playing Hell. I had no idea where the hell this was coming from. You have to bear in mind that by about 1996, my music was over with. I was around for the four horseman of the musical apocalypse sure. I saw NSYNC perform at my high school with a recorded applause. But all that said, the music that I took to heart was over with by then. I nearly burst out laughing when Ivanka Trump said she was a Millennial the other night. Anything that came after was something distinctly different to me. Just like Hell was distinctly different than anything made by Nirvana, The Offspring, and Green Day to name a few. Even when I went to Tower Records, they had no idea what I was talking about when I asked about the album. Of course this all changed when the mini-swing revival of the mid-90s kicked into high gear. I think it’s fair to say that The Brian Setzer Orchestra was spearheading the short-lived movement.

A few years later after this brief seemingly out of nowhere revival happened, I was in Lake Tahoe, CA with my parents. We were lucky because we got to see Brian Setzer perform. It wasn’t with the full orchestra. That was a little disappointing, but it was pretty awesome to see such a good guitarist return to his rockabilly roots that are all over this early 1980s Stray Cats song. The music video doesn’t feature dancing in the same way that all the other videos I will spotlight this week do, but I love the band, song, and I did just finish watching four of Lifetime’s “at 17” movies.

In this video we have a square classroom transformed through the power of a camera cut, and the band protesting in class. Once they look ready to take on Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle (1955), they are off to sing, play, and dance. There isn’t really anything to bring up seeing as it is relatively simple. They do a good job of pulling you in and making you want to dance along because those parents just don’t understand.

As for the girl, she’s sexy, kind of reminds me of Benatar, and is most certainly not 17 seeing as we basically see her butt naked.

Rock This Town and Stray Cat Strut are awesome, but I love this one too. I can imagine this being one of those music videos that not only reintroduced kids to the roots of rock, but had them dancing in front of their televisions.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Love Is A Battlefield by Pat Benatar (1983, dir. Bob Giraldi)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

This is one of those music videos like Take On Me by a-ha where I ask myself what the heck am I going to add. Regardless, I’ll try.

The three big things in this music video are narrative, spoken dialogue, and many sets.

This short film could have been released back in the 1910s and it would have fit structurally as an early example of short form narrative filmmaking. The film takes us from Pat being kicked out of her home, working at a seedy nightclub, and then heading back on the road after she leads a dancing revolt against a nasty boss. It’s noteworthy that she never goes home. Go ahead and put aside the girl power part of it that we will see again in a much better form later on, and focus on that this was sent into people’s homes many times a day. Instead of screams of “leave me alone” turning into something violent, the music video offers a non-violent solution to its’ audience.

The second thing is the spoken dialogue. We take that for granted now. I mean we looked at Weezer’s Buddy Holly a ways back, and it’s loaded with it. However, back then, it was brand spanking new with this music video. Before Love Is A Battlefield, that simply did not exist in music videos.

The third thing is very simple. Going along perfect with the 5+ minute length music video, it also used numerous sets, and cut back and forth between them. It’s not something to be overlooked when watching this music video.

I’m sure I will find plenty of innovation as I move into more recent music videos, but just like early cinema, it’s always fascinating to see early music videos as they tried all sorts of different things. Especially when the song that is playing is merely a recent incarnation of an ancient art form. An ancient art form simply mixed with an art form that by 1983 had been around for about 95 years. The first 30 or so of those devoted to making films like this. Sometimes they were even focused around a performance of a song such as several films that Alice Guy made.

At the end of the day, they didn’t call it music television for no special reason. I’ve seen TV stations that play nothing but music. MTV took what was largely used as a replacement for a live performance on a music show, and did what early cinema did when they moved from Queen Elizabeth in 1912 where you can literally see the dust coming off of Sarah Bernhardt’s costume cause it was seen as just canned theater to something that in 2016 isn’t even seen as separate from the songs. Ask any parents with kids, and they’ll tell you they don’t buy music. They simple AirPlay music from their computer or other device to the TV. I do this myself, and I was born the year this music video came out.

Music Video of the Day: Rosanna by Toto (1982, dir. Steve Barron)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

Unless Lisa has changed her mind (very possible), she is currently posting dance scenes that she loves this week. I like coordinating a theme around a week or a month like we do here sometimes at Through The Shattered Lens. That’s why I am going to post six videos this week that feature dancing. I am starting with Toto’s Rosanna.

As you may have noticed, this is another one of these done by director Steve Barron. So far we have seen him direct music videos for The Human League in 1983 and a-ha in 1985. In 1982 he took Toto, who is probably best known for songs like Africa and Hold The Line, and brought us this mixture of Cynthia Rhodes doing her thing, West Side Story (1961), and Toto looking like they are on a darker looking version of the set that Stray Cats used in Stray Cat Strut.

The music video is similar to Whitesnake’s 1987 version of Here I Go Again. By that I mean they filmed some of Toto’s performance, but it’s really Cynthia Rhodes who shines as the West Side Story lady dancing in a red dress. My favorite part is at about the three minute mark of the video when it goes into pure instrumental and she lifts her leg up completely straight into the air against the chain link fence. Another nice moment is around the two minute mark when we are looking at a closeup shot of the lead singer’s face. In one shot of his face, we can see Rhodes dancing in the background, and the other time see the gang members walking towards him.

It also happens to be a great song by a group that certainly doesn’t get the same love as their songs such as Africa and Hold The Line. You can probably still talk to teenagers today who will not know the name of the group or the title of the song, but they will remember hearing that song about “I blessed the rains down in Africa” or “I touched the rains down in Africa” they heard on the radio at some point.

One final thing is that you might not know Cynthia Rhodes. She played Penny Johnson in Dirty Dancing (1987). She was also in the critical failure of a sequel to Saturday Night Fever (1977) called Staying Alive (1983). In other words, I think it’s safe to say that being in Runaway (1984) was the real reason she ultimately wound up giving up her career to be a full-time mother as IMDb says she did. She would also show up in at least two other videos done by her then husband Richard Marx. That, and she is a well-known dancer of the period in general.

This is also one of those music videos where we know more than just the director. Paul Flattery produced this music video. We will see him again and again.

It’s an excellent music video for an excellent song, and I hope you enjoy it.

Music Video of the Day: Never Say Never by Romeo Void (1983, dir. ???)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

Sticking with obscure, I give you Never Say Never by Romeo Void. It’s another one that I only know of because of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. We’ll probably get to every song on there except some of the Latin Jazz. Yes, I do know that there are more obscure music videos than this one such as Ah Leah by Donnie Iris and Johnny Are You Queer? by Josie Cotton, but those are for other days.

First off, I put 1983, but there seems to be disagreement between the two big music video databases, VEVO, and Wikipedia. IMVDb says that it’s from 1981. Mvdbase says it’s from 1983. VEVO says 1981. I’m going ahead with 1983. The reason is that Wikipedia says the song was recorded in December of 1981, then released in January of 1982. I also get the distinct impression that this is a band that would initially say no way to MTV, but then change their tune when they realized MTV would take anything as long as you were white. They really were that desperate early on. People tend to forget that, but MTV was a fledgling network. How fledgling? They don’t start playing the song until a minute and five seconds into a four minute and thirty-seven second video. I can see them saying, “Oh, you mean we can also get creative visually around our song, and you really don’t have a problem with it? In that case, never say never, and sign us up.”

There is no director listed anywhere that I can find, but two directors come to mind. Those being Jim Jarmusch and Jim McBride. McBride even directed the remake of Breathless (1983). The beginning of this video sure reminds me of the original. The guy in the video even dies like Jean-Paul Belmondo did in the original Breathless (1960). The music video also screams early French New Wave. He also directed Great Balls of Fire! (1989) and in 2000 did the feature length VH1 original movie Meatloaf: To Hell and Back. So, if I have to make a guess here. This was possibly directed by Jim McBride.

I love this video. I think that no film should be left behind, but I love it when a music video takes advantage of the visual medium instead of just playing the song in front of a camera.

Also, is that Keanu Reeves in there? I doubt it, but you never know. I mean Courtney Cox is in Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen, so why not? Plus, I’m not that familiar with the members of the band. In fact, this is the one and only song by Romeo Void I have ever heard in my life.

I can’t possibly imagine this being in anything but this extra dark black and white. I also can’t imagine them drawing you more into their performance even if they cutaway from time to time to other things. No doubt No Doubt got some of their style from Romeo Void. The sexual tension between the lead singer and the band is all over this thing like it is in No Doubt music videos.

One last thing to mention. It is censored. They cut out the word “fuck”. Kind of interesting that it’s there. That means it originally aired that way, much like Shoop by Salt-N-Pepa originally aired with the word “retard” in it. It is fascinating, and sad how much more censorship happy we’ve become over the years. I don’t really mind “retard” not being there, but put the “fuck” back into a song that has a chorus that says: “I might like you better if we slept together”. At least we have access to older stuff like this, so it isn’t lost even if the VEVO versions get censored. Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Your Love by The Outfield (1986, dir. John Jopson)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

I must admit that at times I do pick out music videos or films to write about simply because I know that they will get hits. Despite that, I do tend to gravitate to things that at least other people aren’t talking about, but watch en masse. Today isn’t one of those days. This happens to be one of my favorite songs, that once again, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s soundtrack introduced me to.

The first and most obvious thing is the lead singer is a little person. At a time when they were either Ewoks, Leprechauns, Trolls, and/or Sorcerers on the big screen, we had Tony Lewis belting out songs like Your Love on MTV being broadcast into people’s homes. That’s something a lot of people who are anti-music video forget. These short films brought so much culture to people that they would have been ignorant of were it not for their existence.

Now, to be fair, we also had Phil Fondacaro in Troll (1986) delivering a surprisingly good performance when he was not in costume. But we aren’t here to talk Harry Potter today.

Aside from the size of the lead singer, and them playing that up, I like that this video has four layers of capturing reality built into it. The first is the plan vanilla flavored “have the band stand on a stage and play”. It’s been done to death, and would be repeated in one form or another again and again for decades without any foreseeable end.

The second is when we step behind the scenes of that video and see the camera, crane, and crew shooting that plain vanilla flavored video. We saw that in something like I Ran (So Far Away) by A Flock Of Seagulls as well. It’s the self-reflexive version of what we are looking at.

The third is that throughout this video there is a painting motif to the whole thing. This appears in the backgrounds. Sometimes paint literally is put across the frame. Then there is the girl who is presumedly painting a portrait of Tony as he sings. This is when the video has now stepped from the fantasy of the performance to the reality of the shooting of the video to the fantasy of representing something as a painting.

Then the video goes for one more when it returns the video back to reality once again by pulling the camera out to the street threw the previous layers to show the girl leaving the studio with the painting. It’s a very drab and boring shot to end on with some blue paint that runs down the frame till it cuts to black.

I love that none of these four different places are cleanly segmented from each other. An example is when we see the guitarist leave the stage to go over and look in on the girl doing the painting.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I doubt it. One, it is an 1980s video when they really seemed to get creative. Also, this is one of those videos where we know more than just the director. According to IMVDb, Glenn Lazzaro edited the video. He’s worked on his fair share of music videos and other films. Karen Bellone produced the video and seems to have done that for several music videos. Likely both Lazzaro and Bellone have directed or worked on more music videos that are just not properly documented.

I haven’t really strongly mentioned it before, but IMDb really does want submissions of music videos. These are highly undocumented short films that could keep me going till the day I died, and I still would barely get out of the 1980s. Even with Internet Music Video Database and mvdbase, this stuff is still full of holes, and belongs in the central repository that is IMDb.

That said, Mvdbase turns up a bunch more videos for all three of the people I mentioned. I had completely forgotten about that database and will be going back to clean up some of my previous entries. So, submit!

Music Video of the Day: I Ran by A Flock Of Seagulls (1982, dir. Tony van den Ende)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

I did a second video by prolific music video director Steve Barron yesterday. Today I thought I would do one by a different prolific director of music videos that we haven’t hit yet. The song I Ran of course is about as well known as You Spin Me Round (Like A Record). There’s no need to discuss that here. Especially not when there is a fascinating music video to focus on.

There are four parts to this video for me:

1. The video was intended as a homage to the album cover for Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s album (No Pussyfooting).

Frippenopussyfooting

2. The cameras are clearly visible in the mirrors. They aren’t in the original album cover, so I’m assuming they either were rushed, or they did it on purpose. I’m going with it being done on purpose. Just like a music video that deliberately doesn’t have the band members lip sync, this is an interesting way for the video to be self-reflexive. In this case, you are literally seeing the video you are watching being made right before your eyes. Or, to look at it in another way, you are seeing the band unable to escape the camera as a tie-in with the theme of the song.

3. Probably the best known experimental film that director Chantal Akerman made was La Chambre (1972). It was mostly comprised of a series of 360 degree pans showing us the interior of a room along with Akerman herself on a bed. One of the two parts of this video takes that idea of using those 360 degree pans, but instead attaches the group to the pan, so that once again, they can’t escape the camera. I have to wonder if he was thinking of her film.

4. While people remember the 360 sequences the best, there are the hallway portions as well. Those play into the theme of the song in that the band can’t escape the ladies, but also because of the way those ladies move. It’s almost as if they are high fashion zombies. Zombies being the monster that will inevitably catch up to you no matter how far, or how long you run.

It’s music videos like this that I love to look at because it’s obvious that a fair amount of thought went into crafting them.

Music Video of the Day: (Keep Feeling) Fascination by The Human League (1983, dir. Steve Barron)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

Two years before he directed a-ha’s Take on Me, Steve Barron directed this very simple music video for The Human League. He has a huge filmography when it comes to music videos from the late 1970s through the 1980s. We’ll see him again. He also directed some features such as the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) and Coneheads (1993).

He did this video with it’s single color room, single color clothes, and single color outside that reminds one of conformity. It’s also a place that is located on a map, or a starting place or turning point for your life. I like how the lyrics of the song, and of course the gender non-conformity of Philip Oakey, contrast with the appearance of the room and the band. I don’t know about you, but I look at this video and can see this room transform into the pencil drawn one from Take on Me.

Oakey was known to even dress in matching outfits with female members of the band back then. He isn’t transgender or anything like that. He was just gender non-conforming.

The area you see as being orange was actually painted that way shortly before the house was demolished. The band’s scenes were filmed in a studio, which you can spot as the camera goes through the window. There is a tiny little bit that is easy to miss with the orange. Outside the house there are a couple of kids playing with a soccer ball. When one of the kids retrieves it from the orange outside of the house, his clothes suddenly change color to match.

This is another song that I discovered courtesy of the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City soundtrack.

Music Video of the Day: Rusty Cage by Soundgarden (1992, dir. Eric Zimmerman)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

While I certainly enjoy spotlighting music videos that I really know, or enjoyed as a kid, part of doing these posts is personal discovery for me. I have owned a copy of Badmotorfinger since people actually bought CDs. It was the dark ages. I’m not one of those people to act high and mighty about something stupid like that. Although, it is neat to be holding the liner notes in my hands right now. This is the first time I’ve looked at them. That tells you how much I cared about that stuff. It actually has the lyrics for each of the songs written on it divided by a triangle like the one on the cover.

The music video is entirely new to me. I would never have thought to take a group like Soundgarden, and have them playing their song called Rusty Cage in a pristine white room. Although, it does contrast well with the outside where the action takes place. Frankly the outside of the room looks like an Alice in Chains video. In fact, you could say that inside that shack is an era of music about to be nuked out of existence by bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, so it’s appropriate that at the end, the shack is destroyed by a car.

Also, am I the only one who looks at the shack they are in and thinks of Doctor Who? Probably because of that running joke that Internet movie reviewer Phelous used to do with a shack in his yard as his Tardis.

The song itself is one of my favorite Soundgarden songs purely for the guitar. I am a sucker for a great solo, riff, etc. on the guitar. I love the speed at which the music video cuts to go along with the speed of the guitar. That’s another thing I am a sucker for: speed in music. That speed can be the lyrics too. I don’t think I have mentioned it elsewhere, but for 2nd grade show and tell, I sang the opening song to The Music Man (1962) from memory. Again, the dark ages because me and my dad had to transcribe the lyrics from the movie for me to memorize them. I loved the speed at which the lyrics were sang. Here it is hopefully.

That’s not to say that the rest of it isn’t quality. I mean it is Chris Cornell singing back before the musical apocalypse of the late 90s destroyed children’s ability to recognize a great voice. American Idol hasn’t helped over the years either.

Finally, Johnny Cash covered this song too. This was news to me. Here’s that song for comparisons sake.

Music Video of the Day: Revenge by Ministry (1983, dir. Tim Pope)

Posted on by Valerie Troutman

I must admit I don’t know a whole lot about Ministry other than a few things I have read about them and their music. I first found them the way most people probably did. That being through songs like Jesus Built My Hotrod and Just One Fix. These are industrial rock/metal songs although I have heard them referred to more like hardcore punk. You could argue that if you want. I think less Dead Kennedys, and more if Depeche Mode didn’t sing Just Can’t Get Enough and instead played their style of music with more politics in a metal fashion the way Ministry has done for the majority of their career.

I remember some MTV/VH1 thing bringing up that Ministry actually started as a Snythpop band. I remember them playing this up like it was some sort of magical metamorphosis the group had gone through. I remember at the time eating that up. Not anymore. I don’t care what the situation was with lead singer Alain Jourgensen at the time, the reason for the ultimately minor change that only looks huge, and stupid comments on their videos saying:

“Hopefully those synth pop loving post punk wannabes have been flushed out with this ministry, dragged on the street under cars and murdered with hate crimes.”

I didn’t make that up. That’s an actual comment left on one of their videos.

I listen to this, then The Land of Rape and Honey and hear the same kind of song. Synthpop and Industrial Rock/Metal are related genres. The fact that he chose to go with something more hardcore didn’t fundamentally change their sound like a metamorphosis would suggest. I like their Synthpop sound too before they expanded on it and made it harder. I welcome an edgier Depeche Mode. Just like I welcome them saying that’s not for them and evolving their sound. It’s just ridiculous when you hear talk about this like it’s a metamorphosis. If Neil Sedaka decided to start playing heavy metal, then sure, but not this. This is the creation/mass discovery of a new style of music built on previous ones. Ministry just happened to not just be at the forefront, but actually started on the edges of the main original genre and tweaked it till they found their true voice.

As for the music video itself, it makes me think of the shot on video Japanese 80s horror film Death Powder (1986).

Death Powder (1986, dir. Shigeru Izumiya)

Death Powder (1986, dir. Shigeru Izumiya)

I haven’t even watched that movie either other than to get a screenshot earlier this year, and it is still the first thing that comes to mind when I look at this video.

I mentioned before how related the two styles are to each other, but you can really tell when you watch the video. It’s like you can literally see something such as Jesus Built My Hotrod lying just under every surface in the video ready to burst out. Especially burst right out Jourgensen’s face and body.

I like connections, so it made sense to use this as the first Ministry music video to feature.