Month: September 2022

Cussless Criminal

On 30 September 2022

In 1995, 90ies, Eulogies

When Artis Leon Ivy Jr – better known by his stage name Coolio – was tasked with writing a song for the 1995 movie Dangerous Minds about a school in difficult circumstances, troubled students, and their idealist teacher portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer, he was more than happy to take up the idea of fellow singer “L.V.” (short for Large Variety) to do a modernised version of Stevie Wonder’s 1976 song Pastime Paradise. Alas, long-time Baptist Wonder was not too receptive to the idea after being confronted with the swearing Coolio sprinkled throughout his rapping, giving his okay only once the profanities had been removed. It certainly helped that the revised lyrics of “Gangsta’s Paradise” start with a verse from the bible.

While the rapper’s ideas for the video included tuned cars and the ‘hood, he trusted director Antoine Fuqua to do the right thing. It features scenes from the movie interspersed with shots of Coolio in the same setting, which diverged from the typical videos of the time where it would more likely have been concert shots. Having the photogenic Pfeiffer in the video certainly helped the song, while having the earworm in the movie attracted viewers to the cinema in a perfect symbiosis.

Like so many artists, he would have a series of minor hits and appear in film and television, but never again score quite such a triumph.

Last Wednesday Coolio suffered cardiac arrest and transitioned into whatever Paradise he might have personally believed in.

His later hit C U When U Get There is based on another piece of music you really need to know, Pachelbel’s Canon, but that one is from just ever so slightly outside of the time range we’re concerning ourselves with.

Mellifluous Con-Man

By vanElden

On 27 September 2022

In 1984, 80ies, Girl Power Tuesday, Must-See-Video

Helen Folasade Adu – better known by her stage name Sade – was a background singer with the Latin Soul band Pride when she started performing her song “Smooth Operator”, co-written with Pride’s guitarist Ray St. John as a solo-performance during concerts. The renditions got such good feedback that she decided to split and form her own band, taking along half of the personnel of Pride. It was a wise move: When they played their first concert at the Heaven nightclub in London they already attracted so many aspiring audience members that about a thousand of them had to be turned away at the door.

Despite the honey-sweet melody the song is about a quite evil actor in high society, a playboy who’s breaking hearts left and right while taking on all sorts of facets of a criminal’s job-description: con-man, gun-fencing, pimping, you name it.

The song was a huge international hit and the stepping stone for Sade’s career as one of the most successful British women in history.

In the extended version of the video the perpetrator is chased over rooftops by the police and falls to his doom.

Who is What When?

By vanElden

On 23 September 2022

In 1992, 90ies

Remember the time we talked about Frank Farian, the practice of having performers lip-sync songs, and the backlash this brought about? Well, just around the time Milli Vanilli got caught when their tape skipped at a concert it happened that another band of their label (Ariola Munich) called Snap! produced a video of their 1990ies hit “The Power”. The two German producers had gone to an American army base to find themselves an American rapper, but for the melody, they had flown in Penny Ford, who at the time was Chaka Khan’s vocal director and main backup singer. However, when it came to the video, instead of looking for Ford (who was working with Mick Jagger by then) they went back to the army base and found themselves another nice face, Jackie Harris, to mime the vocal track. Which did not sit well at all with Ford, who made sure to become the proper legitimate face of Snap!.

The relationship didn’t last long though, as the chemistry between Ford and rapper Turbo B. didn’t work out, and when Snap! asked her two years later to do the vocals on “Rhythm Is A Dancer” she couldn’t do it, as she had signed up with Sony and Ariola belonged to BMG. She was allowed to write for them though, and for the actual singing part, she found them Thea Austen as a replacement. Who performed in the video, too. Pinky swear.

Austen left the band shortly after the song was recorded, to be replaced by Madonna’s backup singer Niki Haris. It was way more complicated to keep track of which group consisted of which musicians with Eurodance than back with the good old Rock bands. But then again, nobody really cared.

“I’m as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer” certainly must be a strong contender for the worst line in pop history.

Political Appropriation

By vanElden

On 20 September 2022

In 1984, 80ies, Guitar Gods

When Bruce Springstreen, aka The Boss, wrote “Born In The U.S.A.” as a title track for a film about the Vietnam war – the first war America ever lost – and the stark difference in how it’s veterans were treated to those coming home as winners, he did not anticipate how totally misunderstood the song would be for generations to come.

Springsteen had never shied away from expressing his strong political convictions, standing especially for working-class people but also gender equality, immigrant and LGBTQ rights and environmental issues. So it was a rather strange notion when Ronald Reagan, whose presidency started the downfall of the American middle classes and whose policies The Boss explicitly rejected, used the song to rally his followers, misunderstanding the song for a patriotic anthem instead of the bitter critique it really is. But people would still not get it 35 years later, when the song was heard outside the hospital where then president Trump was treated for Covid-19. While Springsteen considers the song one of his best, it does bother him that it’s so widely misunderstood.

True to his convictions he also turned down an offering of 12 million US$ to let Chrysler use the song in one of their campaigns. Springsteen never allowed any of his songs to be used to sell a product.

As he did not want the video to be lip-synched, he opted instead to use shots from some concerts, and for the sake of synchronity had to wear the same outfit for a number of consecutive shows. Interspersed with pictures from a Vietnamese neighbourhood in Los Angeles and factory workers, it was an effort to claim the song back from Reagan.

Incidentally, the Album was the first CD to be pressed on American soil.

The Treadmill Song

By vanElden

On 16 September 2022

In 2006, Must-See-Video, Noughties

So far we’ve talked a fair bit about the history and the importance of music videos on MTV, as for almost all of the timespan we’re covering that was the place where you needed to be in order to make it, especially when it came to international popularity. However, in 2005 a new portal appeared in the world that would change the possibilities to become famous forever.

Originally intended to be a dating platform (hello, Facebook) where you could upload a short presentation of yourself, YouTube soon opened it’s field for all kinds of videos, and different to the first online video-sharing site (Vimeo) it grew rapidly right from the beginning. Suddenly it was possible to post your videos and become a) independent of the whims of MTV’s board and VJs and b) able to create content at much cheaper rates.

Early adapters of the new site were OK Go, who managed to score what might just be the first music video going viral with “Here It Goes Again”. It features a complicated choreography by Trish Sie, the sister of lead singer Damian Kulash, on treadmills that took seventeen takes to film, out of which in only three the band managed to stay on the routine. Its home-made, unprofessional look yet everything falling into place is mirrored in today’s viral TikToks, but at the time this was something never seen before (well, maybe apart from this video). It soon became the most watched video of all YouTube and would eventually win a Grammy.

I would guess not many people remember the actual music these days, but if you were on the interwebs back then I bet you do remember the video.

They originally wanted to call the song “The Treadmill Song” but decided against it, in order not to confuse people who hadn’t seen the video. In hindsight they need not have bothered…

First Breaths

By vanElden

On 13 September 2022

In 1994, 90ies, Around The World

We continue last week’s theme of only locally popular music and have a closer look at the Senegalese artist Youssou N’Dour, who is considered one of the most celebrated African artists in history. He joined Star Band, Dakar’s most popular band in the 1970ies at the tender age of sixteen and became one of the founding fathers of Mbalax, a hugely popular musical style combining traditional Senegalese music with the Latin styles popular at the time. But despite frequent collaborations with several well-known Western musicians (not least among them Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon) outside Africa he is by far best known for the single he did together with Swedish singer Neneh Cherry.

Cherry – whose family history is rather complicated and who moved a fair bit around the Western hemisphere in her life – stated that the huge success the song had worldwide took her quite by surprise, as the track was supposed to be an experiment.

The title of “7 Seconds” refers to the first few breaths in the life of a child, as of yet unaware of the harshness and violence of the world it’s coming into. It features lyrics in French, English and the West African Wolof.

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French Wanderlust

By vanElden

On 9 September 2022

In 1986, 80ies, Around The World

It’s a rare occasion for a French song to get to the top of the charts in countries that do not speak the language, which might explain why Claudie Fritsch-Mentrop, better known by her stage name “Desireless” is kind of considered a one-hit-wonder outsider her native France. But “Voyage Voyage” made it to the top in several countries, including the UK and Ireland, West Germany (you do remember there used to be two Germanies, don’t you?), Norway and Spain. Ironically it only made it to second place in France itself.

Fritsch-Mentrop was originally in fashion design and started her singing career relatively late, after a trip to India. She created the androgynous and cold persona of Desireless and had a falling out with her label as they wanted too much influence in the character for her taste.

While she’s still performing and writing new songs she was never able to reproduce the fame outside France.

Probably the only music video featured on our blog that prominently mentions its director.

Pursuing Cascades

By vanElden

On 6 September 2022

In 1995, 90ies, Girl Power Tuesday, Must-See-Video

Despite being the best-selling American Girl Group there was a time when the members of TLC had to file for bankruptcy – just like M.C. Hammer, for whom they had been opening act in the early 1990ies. But neither that, nor sickle-cell anemia or burning down a multi-million-dollar mansion in a drunken fight with a boyfriend stopped them from having careers filled with both hits and headlines.

Their signature song, is very socially conscious, with the eponymous “Waterfalls” referring to elusive fantasies and their “chasing” giving little thought to consequences. It was addressing the prevailing problems of the 90ies, notably the dangers in the illicit drug dealing scene and the importance of safer sex due to the rising number of HIV infections. It’s certainly the first number-one song that contained the word “AIDS”.

The video, featuring liquefied versions of the band members which were notoriously difficult to render was absolute state-of-the-art at the time and cost over a million dollars to create.

When Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who had written and performed the rap part of the track died in a car accident in 2002 the verses were engraved into her coffin.

High School Mosh Pit

By vanElden

On 2 September 2022

In 1991, 90ies, Must-See-Video

It’s our 50th episode and to celebrate that we’re having a special treat: One of the most important, influential and decade-defining videos of the 1990’s.

One night in the winter of 1990 Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill, and Kurt Cobain were out spraying graffiti in the streets of Seattle and got hideously plastered before hanging out at his room, where the intoxicated Hanna took out a sharpie and began to write on the walls. As Cobain had been recently dumped by her bandmate Tobi Vail she thought it important to let her readers now that he reeked of Vail’s deodorant, “Teen Spirit”. Alas, the meaning was lost on Cobain, who read “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a compliment of his rebellious essence and asked Hanna for permission to use the phrase for the title of a song he had been working on. He intended it to be “the ultimate pop song – ripping off The Pixies”. The manufacturer of the deodorant certainly welcomed the free publicity…

The song became a huge hit and as a result Cobain was often considered a spokesman for Generation X – for whom “Here we are now, entertain us” became somewhat of a credo – , which he despised just as much as the term “Grunge” that was assigned to their music.

The audience in the video was recruited at a Nirvana concert a few days earlier, where director Samuel Bayer handed out flyers looking for kids between 18 and 25, attending as a typical high-school persona: punk, nerd, jock (Well, most of them were. The cheerleaders came from a local strip club). They had expected to be there for an hour or so, but were ordered to sit in the stands and look bored for more than 11 hours, while the band was acting out a prep rally. As a result there was quite some pent up aggression when they finally requested to destroy the set – and when permitted so they did. The mosh pit and destruction is quite real.

Up to this point it was the norm for people on MTV to be pretty and trendy and initially the network refused to play the video. However, they finally gave in and due to the video the practice actually changed, paving the way for artists with “radio faces” – and by the year 2000 it had become the most played video on MTV Europe.

Note from the editor: So we made it to 50 videos. Yay! Unfortunately the two visitors we get on a good day don’t really justify the time required to keep up the pace, which is why starting next week we’re cutting down to two episodes per week. Thank you for your understanding!

The Pop Anarchy Manifesto

By vanElden

On 1 September 2022

In 1991, 90ies

We already covered that music often is political, and that is of course just as true for the followers of anarchism. But whereas the typical representative of that mindset has a high likelihood of founding a punk band, and expressing her frustrations about the state of the world by screeching in sweat-soaked cellar holes, there are some who take a more sophisticated approach. Such as The KLF (also known by several other monikers), whose explicit goal was to subvert the art world. And so they defaced billboards, fired machine gun blanks into their audiences, deleted their catalogue, and burned all of their earnings in a blazing fire – one million pound sterling.

“Justified And Ancient” had been in the making since the group was formed, originally even sharing the name. Like kindling to blaze it grew over the years and was remade in an upbeat pop-house version, named with the subtitle “Stand by the JAMs” – with vocals by the “First Lady Of Country Music” Tammy Wynette who is best known for “Stand by Your Man” – shortly before they went out with a bang in the aforementioned burning performance, effectively ending the project that was The KLF.

Both Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty would continue with artistic and anarchic projects, but while some of them were really good – Drummond’s “The17” project resonated specifically with me – none made quite as big a splash on a popular front.

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