Back in 1999 there was a big advertising campaign for Levis Jeans featuring “Flat Eric”, a nonsensical creature that the ad director Quentin Dupieux came up with and had made by Jim Hensons Creature Shop. It was constantly on air.
Since Dupieux, who is not only a film-maker but also a musician, had already created a piece of electronic music for the ad (in all of two hours) and it proved to be so hugely popular he decided to release it as well under his musician’s name Mr. Oizo (a corruption of the French word for bird, oiseaux, as he was called by his friends ever since they got really high a long time ago).
People craved for nonsense in those days and the song became a huge international hit.
When you hear the name Bruce Mathers, you, as an employee of VSHN, of course know that we’re talking about our Chairman of the Board. There is, however, a second person sharing the name who is almost as famous.
During his childhood Marshall Bruce Mathers’s family rarely stayed in one place for more than a year and his early life was marked by poverty, violent beatings, and an absent father who rejected his regular letters marking them with “return to sender”. Although he was interested in storytelling and the English language, he never made his peace with the school-system and dropped out at the age of seventeen. However, he was able to express his talent in the form of Rap, going by the name of M&M, which developed into MC Double M and finally Eminem.
Mathers invented yet another character, “Slim Shady”, a brutal and vicious alter ego that allowed him to express his anger with the state of the world and his life. He recorded an EP with the same name that in the aftermath of the 1998 Rap Olympics found its way to Dr. Dre, who upon hearing it requested to meet Eminem immediately. Despite criticism of Dr. Dre for hiring a white rapper and the artist’s fear of being starstruck by the famous producer, the collaboration proved to be very fruitful, with the introduction of Slim Shady – My Name Is – to a wider audience leading to world-wide success.
Unfortunately by today the videos on all official sites – including the one below – have been replaced by a variant with more advertiser friendly lyrics, but with a bit of searching you can still find the original version.
Come next Monday Eminem will celebrate half a century on this planet.
The song features samples from the song I Got To… by British singer Labi Siffre and similar to Coolio’s case, Eminem was required to change some lyrics before being allowed to use the track, as Siffre, being a gay activist, was not okay with the line “My English teacher wanted to have sex in junior high. The only problem was, my English teacher was a guy.”
Do you remember our second episode, with the morphing technology and famous actors? That short movie had cost $4’000’000 to produce. Today’s video, in quite a contrast, came in at $800…
Norman Quention Cook had played in a number of more or less successful bands such as The Housemartins or Freak Power (to whom we most definitely will dedicate a future episode) by the time he adopted the name “Fatboy Slim” in 1996 and went on to popularise the “big beat” genre. When the video to “Rockafeller Skank” was released, director Spike Jonze – who had been unable to work on it – sent Slim his own dance version, which the latter found to be so much better that he commissioned the music video for “Praise You” from Jonze’s fictional “Torrance Community Dance Group”.
And so the video was shot by Jonze and Roman Coppola without permission and in front of unsuspecting spectators (except for one: Cook himself can be spotted among the onlookers), who just so happened to be at the Fox Bruin Theatre in Los Angeles the night when it all went down. A flash mob – four years before the term was officially coined – who would go on to win the Music Video Award for “Best Choreography”. Including a grumpy theatre employee, who turned off the cassette player – which is why the video version of the song is quite different from the album one in that particular respect.
Originally released on her 1997 album “Homogenic”, Björk re-released “All Is Full Of Love” as a single in 1999, accompanied by a video (with a slightly different version) that featured what was back then certainly the most stunning computer animation that had ever been seen outside of lab demos. I remember being completely wowed when it first flickered across my screen. It would go on to be presented in art exhibitions and even was on display in New York City’s Museum of Modern Arts.
The song was written as an ode to spring, as Björk had spent a rough six winter months in the Icelandic mountains and was very glad to hear birds sing again on a cold April morning walk. And Chris Cunningham, having been approached by Björk to film the video, took up the theme of procreation for the video, ingeniously finding a way to make it quite explicit, yet in a way that would not incite censor’s wrath.
