PolarBear
Let's Go Bears!
Hmmm.......what to write?
I think I'll just use one of my blogs from my MySpace blog to start out for now. So here goes nothing:
Memory Lane has kind of a lot of potholes.
Flipping through the digital-cable programming guide, trying to find something to tidy up the house by, I settled on VH-1 Classic, the existence of which I had forgotten despite various people extolling its virtues to me in the past.
It probably goes without saying that not much tidying has gotten done. I came in right before the We Are The '80s programming block got started and I really haven't moved since, except to refill my Diet Coke, which I did without taking my eyes off the screen, because an Italian restaurant's tablecloth had assaulted Bob Geldof.
I graduated from high school in 1986, and I saw some of these videos a hundred times, probably. Obviously I never questioned the clothing, or the hair, or why the zombies in that Billy Idol song couldn't just take the elevator instead of climbing the side of the building (actually, maybe they're vampires, and come to think of it, I'm not sure Billy Idol wasn't a vampire also…or maybe it had nothing to do with the undead…like so many videos of that era, it's tough to say definitively what the ---- is going on). I just watched them, even for songs I hated.
Some of the songs I grew to hate after the video had gone into heavy rotation for a few weeks. "I Don't Like Mondays" isn't one of those songs -- frankly, I can't remember having heard it before, ever, before today -- and I can see why it got passed over for the dozen-airings-a-day treatment. Geldof is weirdly uncharismatic, he got trampled by Plaidzilla, and the other Boomtown Rats all have the fedora-perched-on-back-of-head/pajama-pants-with-high-top-Chucks combo going on. Brutal.
Flawless time capsule, though, really, of both Thatcher-era British set design -- which apparently required mis-lighting the set and dressing it in ugly beige flocked wallpaper -- and of video storytelling at the dawn of MTV. Pose the band at seemingly random, but actually careful intervals in a large white room; angle the camera and pull in for a tight close-up while the band lip-synchs intensely and wears sunglasses; voila, post-heartbreak emotional death.
Another popular inspiration for '80s videos: apocalypse. "99 Luft Balloons" is not a bad song, but it's on every single '80s compilation CD and is overplayed and annoying as a result, and the heavy-handed symbols, coupled with the wedding-video-sponsored-by-ConAgra production values, make it seem longer and tween-er than it is already.
"99 Luft Balloons" (…look, that's how the VH-1 brain trust spells it in the credits) also points up a motif in '80s videos, namely the impossible task of playing the keyboard believably. Take the average Bon Jovi offering: everyone is fake-playing their instruments, and by and large they can get away with it, because it's the guitar, or the drums. Jon Bon is flying around on guy wires, Richie Sambora is hatha-yogaing away on the guitar solo, you know it's not real but they can sell it. And then the camera cuts to David Bryan playing a D-major chord really hard and making a "hells yeah" face, each hand a pointedly tensed claw of deeply felt musical emotion all "I am Lord Vader and this assortment of Casio keyboards is my pod, where I feel safe but so, so alone," and it's a keyboard, is the thing. If it's an actual piano, I can let it go; the piano is in fact a percussion instrument and you do occasionally have to do a rocking fugue on the bench to get things done. You don't have to do that with an '80s keyboard that probably doesn't have pressure-sensitivity technology yet.
So the Nena keyboarder has the unenviable job of selling us on the idea that his giant red Mad-Maxerchief is actually strangling him, so he must fight for his life! Go tell Aunt Rhody I'm kicking some A**! Rrrrrrrrawhhh!
Dear sir: No.
As if reading my mind, the next video went lights-up with a moody shot of a real piano in a studio, and I said out loud, "This doesn't look like the Bruce Hornsby videos I reme-- holy crap, 'Valotte'!"
Julian Lennon was a pretty major whoop back then, but I had forgotten "Valotte" entirely, although evidently that's the name of the album. "Too Late For Goodbyes" was the one that took over for an entire season; I remember running laps in basketball practice while that song was reverberating all around me. (It's not a fond memory.)
Whatever happened to this guy? The video is not anything to write home about, but the song isn't bad of its era, and it's just him singing, which is a refreshing change, '80s-wise, from the "we're standing angrily in a field, wearing neon trenchcoats and slippers that look like animal feet while surreal stuff happens in the background" visual vocab. He looked and sounded really startlingly like his father, so if Sir McCartney's career could survive a decade of chintzily executed arrangements, why didn't Julian Lennon's?
…Shoes? Who the ----? I have never heard the song before in my life, and it's decent, actually, but when did Jackson Browne and Mark Hamill have a kid together and make him the lead singer of a band?
I think I'll just use one of my blogs from my MySpace blog to start out for now. So here goes nothing:
Memory Lane has kind of a lot of potholes.
Flipping through the digital-cable programming guide, trying to find something to tidy up the house by, I settled on VH-1 Classic, the existence of which I had forgotten despite various people extolling its virtues to me in the past.
It probably goes without saying that not much tidying has gotten done. I came in right before the We Are The '80s programming block got started and I really haven't moved since, except to refill my Diet Coke, which I did without taking my eyes off the screen, because an Italian restaurant's tablecloth had assaulted Bob Geldof.
I graduated from high school in 1986, and I saw some of these videos a hundred times, probably. Obviously I never questioned the clothing, or the hair, or why the zombies in that Billy Idol song couldn't just take the elevator instead of climbing the side of the building (actually, maybe they're vampires, and come to think of it, I'm not sure Billy Idol wasn't a vampire also…or maybe it had nothing to do with the undead…like so many videos of that era, it's tough to say definitively what the ---- is going on). I just watched them, even for songs I hated.
Some of the songs I grew to hate after the video had gone into heavy rotation for a few weeks. "I Don't Like Mondays" isn't one of those songs -- frankly, I can't remember having heard it before, ever, before today -- and I can see why it got passed over for the dozen-airings-a-day treatment. Geldof is weirdly uncharismatic, he got trampled by Plaidzilla, and the other Boomtown Rats all have the fedora-perched-on-back-of-head/pajama-pants-with-high-top-Chucks combo going on. Brutal.
Flawless time capsule, though, really, of both Thatcher-era British set design -- which apparently required mis-lighting the set and dressing it in ugly beige flocked wallpaper -- and of video storytelling at the dawn of MTV. Pose the band at seemingly random, but actually careful intervals in a large white room; angle the camera and pull in for a tight close-up while the band lip-synchs intensely and wears sunglasses; voila, post-heartbreak emotional death.
Another popular inspiration for '80s videos: apocalypse. "99 Luft Balloons" is not a bad song, but it's on every single '80s compilation CD and is overplayed and annoying as a result, and the heavy-handed symbols, coupled with the wedding-video-sponsored-by-ConAgra production values, make it seem longer and tween-er than it is already.
"99 Luft Balloons" (…look, that's how the VH-1 brain trust spells it in the credits) also points up a motif in '80s videos, namely the impossible task of playing the keyboard believably. Take the average Bon Jovi offering: everyone is fake-playing their instruments, and by and large they can get away with it, because it's the guitar, or the drums. Jon Bon is flying around on guy wires, Richie Sambora is hatha-yogaing away on the guitar solo, you know it's not real but they can sell it. And then the camera cuts to David Bryan playing a D-major chord really hard and making a "hells yeah" face, each hand a pointedly tensed claw of deeply felt musical emotion all "I am Lord Vader and this assortment of Casio keyboards is my pod, where I feel safe but so, so alone," and it's a keyboard, is the thing. If it's an actual piano, I can let it go; the piano is in fact a percussion instrument and you do occasionally have to do a rocking fugue on the bench to get things done. You don't have to do that with an '80s keyboard that probably doesn't have pressure-sensitivity technology yet.
So the Nena keyboarder has the unenviable job of selling us on the idea that his giant red Mad-Maxerchief is actually strangling him, so he must fight for his life! Go tell Aunt Rhody I'm kicking some A**! Rrrrrrrrawhhh!
Dear sir: No.
As if reading my mind, the next video went lights-up with a moody shot of a real piano in a studio, and I said out loud, "This doesn't look like the Bruce Hornsby videos I reme-- holy crap, 'Valotte'!"
Julian Lennon was a pretty major whoop back then, but I had forgotten "Valotte" entirely, although evidently that's the name of the album. "Too Late For Goodbyes" was the one that took over for an entire season; I remember running laps in basketball practice while that song was reverberating all around me. (It's not a fond memory.)
Whatever happened to this guy? The video is not anything to write home about, but the song isn't bad of its era, and it's just him singing, which is a refreshing change, '80s-wise, from the "we're standing angrily in a field, wearing neon trenchcoats and slippers that look like animal feet while surreal stuff happens in the background" visual vocab. He looked and sounded really startlingly like his father, so if Sir McCartney's career could survive a decade of chintzily executed arrangements, why didn't Julian Lennon's?
…Shoes? Who the ----? I have never heard the song before in my life, and it's decent, actually, but when did Jackson Browne and Mark Hamill have a kid together and make him the lead singer of a band?