Category: Must-See-Video Page 3 of 4

So far, we’ve been presenting music videos that were specifically created for the song they were accompanying. Today, we’re going to deviate from that just a bit and have a look at an important bit of pop-cultural history where it’s kind of the other way around:

“The Time Warp” is the most well-known of the songs that make up the 1973 musical Rocky Horror Show, a tribute to horror B movies and bad science fiction by Richard O’Brien that worked so well on the stages of London that it was transformed into a movie, appropriately named Rocky Horror Picture Show two years later.

Alas, test screenings didn’t go well in most places. It did get a very loyal fan base at cinemas with traditional Midnight screenings though, such as the Westwood Theatre in Los Angeles or the Waverly Theater in New York City. The same crowd started showing up time and again, occupying the same spaces every viewing. And as they knew the movie in-and-out they started their own little performances, first by shouting quips at the actors on screen, such as “Buy an Umbrella!” at a soaking wet Susan Sarandon standing in the rain. Then others actually brought said umbrella, to be opened just before the tempest hits hardest. Other props followed, like rice to toss during the wedding. Then people started to dress up as characters from the movie, standing at the right position in front of the theatre screen and lip-syncing their lines…

And so from then on to truly experience the movie you’d have to watch it in a crowd of collaborating viewers with know-how. Generations of faithful followers have been putting up elaborate choreographies during showings to this day, making it the longest-running theatrical release in film history. And while the movie sports a fair number of references to earlier pop-cultural phenomenons itself, the attics of these fans of course have been depicted in other movies as well, with “Fame” springing to mind, or, more recently “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”.

We haven’t even started about the tremendous influence the film had on the long road to acceptance for the LGBTQ+ community… Turns out it wasn’t “just” a jump to the left.

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.

While automobiles are likely the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of “Motor City” Detroit MI, the city plays an important role in the history of popular music as well. Long before becoming the birthplace of Techno it was home to musicians from John Lee Hooker to Suzi Quatro, from Bessie Smith to Madonna, from Marvin Gaye to The White Stripes. Not least of whom is Ray Parker Jr.

To call him a One-Hit-Wonder would not do his oeuvre justice, particularly not the many songs he wrote or played guitar on for other famous musicians. Nevertheless “Ghostbusters”, the title song for the 1984 movie of the same name, became his most famous piece of art by a similarly large margin. Quite an achievement considering he was only given a few days to come up with a theme song for the film and the fact that there aren’t exactly many words rhyming with the eponymous profession.

And so we’re going to cut him some slack that the bass-line borrowed heavily from Huey Lewis’ “I Want a New Drug”, which just so happened to be the temporary background music to many scenes in the pre-cut of the film that Parker had received as reference – after all that case was settled out of court.

The video might not be known quite as well as the film these days, but it features cameos by a great number of well-known actors and musicians of the time, none of whom were payed, but doing a favour to director Ivan Reitman, who also directed the movie proper.

Chevy Chase, having featured heavily in the video of a recent episode and popping up in a cameo here might quite possibly now be officially the most featured artist of the blog.

A popular fad of the 80ies we already covered in our first episode was combining live videos with animation. However, while “Sledgehammer” was certainly setting a standard, the title of “best Music Video of the 1980’s” in my opinion goes to a different representative of the genre. One and a half billion views on the remastered version on YouTube alone tell me I’m not the only one to think so.

While there had been a (rather boring) video for A-Ha’s “Take On Me” before, Warner Brothers saw much more potential in the song and so a second version was created. Produced by rotoscoping 3000 frames over the span of 16 weeks the video manages to tell a thrilling story over the course of it’s four minutes, complete with a boy-meets-girl beginning, two menacing villains and a heart-stopping climax where the life of the hero hangs in the balance… Ok, I might exaggerate a bit, but decide for yourself:

While it’s a simple enough concept, the video to Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” back in 1986 provided us with a proper “WTF” moment. It certainly was one of the most noted ones of the era.

The concept of five models of the time as a – quite obviously fake – band was so iconic, that it would be recycled by Robert Palmer in two further videos – but much more noteably in 2003’s epic rom-com “Love Actually”, where the video is parodied by models going one step further when it comes to blank expressions, to the point of being obviously bored to death.