I was going to feature Neil Young’s controversial video for This Note’s For You today but it turns out that the video can’t be embedded anywhere outside of YouTube. That is probably because of a scene in the video in which a Michael Jackson impersonator sets his hair on fire while filming a commercial. This was based on a real-life incident and when it was recreated for the music video, it led to Michael Jackson threatening legal action and MTV briefly banning the video.
So, I decided to go with a different Neil Young video. Wonderin‘ comes from Young’s 13 studio album, 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’. The album was a “rockabilly” album and featured Young performing with a band called The Shocking Pinks, who were put together specifically for the album.
In retrospect, this music video is probably best known for drummer Chad Gracey wandering around in the background while the rest of the band performed the song. Beavis and Butthead speculated that Gracey forgot to bring his drums to the video shoot and that…
Well, why take it from me when you can hear it from the boys themselves?
To the band’s credit, they actually had a sense of humor about the whole thing and, in fact, later credited Beavis and Butthead for helping to make the song a hit. That’s quite a contrast to the reaction that some artists — *cough* Kip Winger *cough* — had to being featured on the show.
To be honest, the main reason that I picked this for today’s music video of the day is because Erin and I both love this song and it’s one that we’ve both listened to several times of the past few months. (When you’re basically stuck inside for the majority of the year, you really do come to appreciate good music.) Add to that, this song always makes me think of my sister, even if she isn’t listening to it with me. The sun is beautiful and so is she. As I always say, one of the best things about being involved with TSL is that I get to work with my sister. She’s always been there for me. She’s always put up with me, even when I was at my worse. I don’t know where I’d be without her.
This, of course, is a cover of a Beatles song. If you think you spotted The Cure’s Robert Smith in this video, you are correct. At the time this song was recorded (and this video made), Robert Smith was temporarily a member of the band. This video was filmed in Venice, which is a wonderful city that I hope I get to once again visit with everyone who I care about.
A few weeks back I was disappointed to find out that I had not seen The Crow: City Of Angels like I thought I had way back in the 90s. Even worse, I discovered they made two more sequels. And for the final cherry on top, they were available to watch. So let me share a little bit from each film, and Barb Wire because I watched it at the same time.
The Crow: City Of Angels (1996, dir. Tim Pope)
Unsurprisingly, the film isn’t very good. It’s a pale rehash of the first film. I hear there’s a print that included a bunch of material that wound up the cutting room floor. I didn’t see it, so I can’t speak to it.
Getting to the screenshot, while I know the villain is impaled before getting Tony Goldwyn’s death from Ghost (1990), I want to know why Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is playing in The Crow universe. It made sense for Michael Myers to reference it in Resurrection. I don’t know what it’s doing here. The Weinsteins produced both films, so maybe they just really liked it.
The Crow: Salvation (2000, dir. Bharat Nalluri)
Of the the three sequels to The Crow, this is the one I’ll remember the most. This one has a guy who is falsely accused of murdering his girlfriend. He is executed in the electric chair, and the crow brings him back. This movie would probably be memorable simply on the grounds that it has Kirsten Dunst, William Atherton, and Fred Ward. Not to me. They’re icing on the cake. The accused killer is played by Eric Mabius. Yes, the actor who plays Hallmark’s wound-tighter-than-a-drum postal worker from the Signed, Sealed, Delivered movies plays the person brought back to seek vengeance. I find that to be amazing.
The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005, dir. Lance Mungia)
Edward Furlong as The Crow. Why not? This movie also brings us Tara Reid as a person who steals someone’s ability to see the future. We have a satanic cult run by David Boreanaz. We have Danny Trejo and Dennis Hopper for good measure. The film sets up like it’s going to be like a spaghetti western, which I guess these movie were to begin with seeing as the plots aren’t too dissimilar to something like Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! (1967). It’s also the only sequel that includes a bunch of scenes during the day. However, all of it comes together as a mess that never really goes anywhere.
Here’s a bonus shot to show you how much they were trying to go with the spaghetti western look.
And yes, the other members of his gang are called War, Pestilence, and Famine.
Barb Wire (1996, dir. David Hogan)
I remember when Barb Wire came out. Baywatch was everywhere expect on my TV. Pamela was unavoidable, at least if you were a kid at the time. It only stuck with me because of the “Don’t call me babe” line that they played in the trailers. I didn’t actually see it till over 20 years later…sort of.
Have you seen Casablanca (1942)? It’s the same movie with a fictional world rather than the real one. It doesn’t even pretend that it isn’t. I know that at heart Star Wars did same kind of thing. The letters of transit are the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo is Rick, and so on and so forth. But Star Wars threw in some Kurosawa and made it all feel exciting and new. It made it its own. The only thing Barb Wire adds is post-apocalypse…and boobs. It’s Pamela Anderson. They come with the package.
You can go through almost every key element or character from Casablanca and find it here. The one upside is that WWII is replaced by a civil war that starts in 2017 and Pamela gives us an eerily accurate description of the real world in the couple of years that followed 2017.
Today’s music video of the day is for another song that I discovered while driving around Vice City in a stolen car.
(Several stolen cars, actually.)
Talk Talk’s Life’s What You Make It is one of the most popular songs on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City‘s FLASH FM. It’s the perfect song to listen to when you’re heading out to take down some drug dealers or if you just want to drive along the beach and wonder why Tommy Vercetti never learned how to swim.
The song was a hit both when it was originally released in 1985 and when it re-released in 1990. The video was filmed in Wimbledon Common, London, during the early hours of the day. The video was directed by Tim Pope, who directed videos for almost everyone in the 80s and 90s but is probably best-regarded for his work with The Cure.
Pope also directed the film, The Crow” City of Angels and was the original director for The Last King of Scotland. Though Pope eventually left and was replaced on that project, he was responsible for casting Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, the role that would eventually win Whitaker an Oscar.
If you’ve ever heard of Slade, then it’s likely because their songs Cum On Feel The Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now were covered by Quiet Riot and The Runaways. I’m not sure what led me to find them, but I’ve enjoyed their music ever since. I had no idea they made it out of the 1970s in order to have music videos like this one out there.
The reason we have it is that Quiet Riot’s cover re-popularized Cum On Feel The Noize. This created attention in America for their music. Thus, we got Run Runaway, among other songs, which did well in the States. And we got this video to go with it.
If the Wikipedia article on the band is to be believed, then they are cited as an influence on just about everyone from the late-70s onward. I can understand that. For me, they fall into the same category as Sweet–ahead of their time, underrated, and influential.
A music video was filmed to promote the single, which was directed by Tim Pope for GLO Productions and cost £16,000 to make. It was shot at Eastnor Castle in Ledbury, Herefordshire. In keeping with the song’s celtic/jig sound, the video featured the band performing the song in front of an audience dressed in tartan. Other sequences showed a marching bagpipe band and a kilted Scot grappling with a caber.
The video was a big success in America, where it reached the top of the playlist charts. Its constant showing on MTV helped “Run Runaway” become Slade’s biggest American hit. Despite its success, the band were disappointed that the video did not feature any direct shots of Powell. In a 1986 interview, Lea said that the band’s only requirement in their music videos is that each band member is featured, however in the “Run Runaway” video, Powell is only seen in the background. In a 1986 fan club opinion poll, fans voted the video was the band’s best music video.
In 2011, the coat guitarist Dave Hill wore in the video sold on eBay for £295. The seller had bought the coat many years ago from the Slade Fan Club where Hill auctioned off a few items to raise money to build a home recording studio.
The only thing I would add is that I like that it captures the goofiness of the band. I especially love the part near the end when the camera is looking up at them. You keep thinking it’s going to cut away from them, but it doesn’t. They just keep going.
According to my calendar, today is Imbolc that is celebrated by Pagans and Wiccans. I know that there is some sorta music video that does exist from 1979 for The Cars’ song Dangerous Type. All I can find are live performances. I could use the cover version that Letters To Cleo did for the movie The Craft (1996). I don’t want to. Especially not when there is this one called Magic, where Ric Ocasek walks on water. I’ve been itching to spotlight this music video.
I kind of wanna just say to simply sit back and enjoy, but there are a couple of things to point out:
This is the obvious one. The song is about a relationship that makes you feel like you can walk on water, so they literally made it seem that Ocasek was walking on water. That’s at least what Songfacts tells me. It makes sense to me.
To create the illusion of walking on water, they built a little platform for him to stand on in the pool that you can see in several shots. The platform collapsed the first time, and they had to adjust it to take his weight.
This is best one. It was filmed at Paris Hilton’s family estate when she was little. I believe she would have been 2 or 3 at the time. She’s not in the video. According to Wikipedia, Kathy Hilton rented the band her house for the music video. The house would also be used a few years later for the movie Blind Date (1987).
I know one of the people is Uncle Sam and another is probably Jesus, but if you have a guess as to who the guy with the eyepatch is, then let me know. I would have thought Patch, of Patch Kayla from Days Of Our Lives. Unfortunately, their characters wouldn’t become a thing till 1986.
The video was produced by Beth Broday. She seems to have done about 20 music videos. A notable one being True Colors for Cyndi Lauper.
This makes three Tim Pope music videos now. We saw him do a video for Ministry when they were very unhappy. We also saw him do a video for Talk Talk when they didn’t mind appearing in the video, but weren’t going to lip-sync. Now we get Tim Pope doing The Safety Dance? By that I mean I have no idea other than that they all do fall under New Wave. Your guess is as good as mine.
I look at this video and not only think it screams British, but also do Louise Court and Mike Edmonds have reunions from time to time to talk about being in this music video that they will never live down? It could be happening. The ladies from Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love do that, so why not these two? Especially since Louise Court was recently found in 2013 working as a director of Hearst Magazine UK. Up till then it was a mystery who this woman was in one of the most well known and aired music videos every made. That’s awesome and really sad. I’ve said it before, but submit music videos to IMDb. They clearly want to put a stop to nonsense like that continuing.
I also look at this music video and see something cheap that was thrown together in a day or so at most. The only particularly interesting parts come right at the very end when the lead singer looks up into the sky and it cuts to a bomb being dropped from a plane as the song starts to sound like a siren. Along with that part, this was apparently done as a protest against the way bouncers were treating a new form of dancing in clubs. Despite it looking like a violent dance, it’s a safe dance that they felt discriminated against for doing in clubs. That’s why the bomb dropping thing happens. It represented the establishment, and the dance was anti-establishment.
The main portion of this video involves the lead singer marching into town and drawing a crowd to come along and dance with him. The ending part though where everyone is just dancing around for fun makes the most sense to me considering the intended message. “Everybody’s taking a chance,” but “it’s safe to dance.”
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)
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.
Through the Shattered Lens 