When R.E.M. (who were supposedly named by pointing randomly into a dictionary and not after “Rapid Eye Movement”, and who up until then had a persistent but smallish fan base on college radio stations) released their single for “Losing My Religion” it became a huge international success with heavy rotations both on radio stations all over the world as well as on MTV. The accompanying video was nominated for a whopping nine video awards of the year and went on to win six of them, including “Video of the Year”.
All of which is of course impressive, but does not explain to me why they couldn’t just use the loo. Misheard lyrics can do that to you.
Here we are now, in containers. Hold me closer, Tony Danza.
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.
Yes, I started this blog as a means to introduce the younger generation to the videos (and eventually just the music) of pop culture that you simply have to know. Which kind of implies that you might not yet know them (as was the case for so many catchy tunes I could no longer leave that unchallenged). But… come on. You do know Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, don’t you? If only from Wayne’s World? Or the guy who sang it in it’s entirety being hideously plastered in the back of a police car? The 2009 Muppets Version? Wikipedia features a whole page dedicated to cover-versions of this brilliant song.
It took Freddie Mercury more than half of a decade to figure out the song in his head and it took the band months to actually record it, in five different studios and with hundreds of overdubs, as the technology of the time allowed for a maximum of 24 concurrent tracks – the final piece features hundreds of them, collected from tape that became see-through in the process, as they were used so often.
When it was finally finished they were told by various executives in no uncertain terms, that the song at almost six minutes was “much too long” (it was highly unusual for songs to skid over the three minutes mark at the time) and that there was “no hope of it ever being played on the radio“. Well, Mercury’s friend DJ Kenny Everett did play it on Capital Radio, 14 times over the span of a weekend, to be exact. The rest is pop history.
By the way: While our first blog-entry might have been The video that would define a genre this one, having been released a decade earlier, was the video that made the industry recognise the medium as a marketing instrument. Originally recorded so the band would not have to perform live on the BBC’s “Top of the Pops”, where they would have had a hard time mimicking playing the song, it became pivotal in selling the single and others would soon follow suit. Still not the first music video by far though, that honour officially goes to “The Little Lost Child“, a song by Joseph Stern and Edward Mark, who set their recording to a slide show back in 1894…
In the early 1980’s a new musical – or perhaps more accurately: cultural – subgrene began to emerge, following the Post-Punk and New Wave movements: Gothic Rock was at the beginning of a whole subculture that would go on for many years, up into the 21st century.
One of the most prominent representatives of the genre was The Cure, with their frontman Robert Smith (the only band member to stay on over the course of the bands 44 years so far) steering the group to a slightly more pop-influenced course from about 1982, which greatly increased the commercial success of the band.
And while the video, featuring the band members stuffed into a giant wardrobe and playing various toy-instruments representing their actual individual craft, looks like it would have been fun to make, apparently it was hugely uncomfortable. Just imagine being confined to an extremely cramped space for twelve hours and then being thrown into a tank filled with 5000 litres of water…
There are a lot of mysteries modern science has been able to crack. The minds of teenagers is not among them. In my generation, dying at the age of 27 years appeared to be a reasonable goal in life to more of my peers than I was probably aware of. After all, a lot of really great musicians had gone down that road, most notably among them Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
While they were in our parents generation, Kurt Cobain became the newest member of the infamous “27 club” when I was a teenager. And seventeen years later Amy Winehouse would join as well, after a long struggle with alcohol and other drug addictions. Highly talented, actually successful on an international market but still haunted by demons beyond her control she decided to call it a definite day while the world was priming itself for even better music to come.
Of course, the warning signs were all there, even from the beginning: “Back To Black”, which marked her international breakthrough already puts the morbid themes that would stay with her throughout her career into the limelight. Brilliantly so. Please make sure to take signs of depression seriously if you notice any with your peers!
When the first single from Lenny Kravitz’ third studio album “Are You Gonna Go My Way” was released – the song bearing the same name – critics were holding back with neither superlatives nor comparisons to one of, if not the greatest guitarist there ever was: Jimi Hendrix.
The accompanying video – shot by Mark Romanek who certainly directed his fair share of famous music videos – features Kravitz in a modern version of an amphitheatre, complete with sophisticated lighting rigging and a crowd going properly wild for what is probably the most eclectic of his songs.
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.
144 times. That’s the number of repetitions the one and only sentence in Daft Punks’ “Around the World” gets. Does that make the song Gross? On the contrary!
The video is resembling the structure of the song quite closely: There are five instruments, and therefore five groups of characters. Robots for voice (apparently powered by the program you wrote back then for that “introduction to algorithms” class, by the looks of their collision reactions 😋), athletes for the bass, disco dancers for the keyboard, skeletons for the guitar (in a divergence to their traditional role in Saint-Saëns’ “Le Carnaval des Animaux”) and last, but not least: mummies for the drums.
A meticulously planned mathematical companion to a catchy tune? Count me in!
Many people the world over have a hard time telling Switzerland and Sweden apart. Sure, they’re both small countries in Europe with excellent quality-of-life, they both start with “Sw”, they’re both really bad when it comes to saving people’s life in a pandemic thanks to their high number of vaccine refusers and people in both countries talk some weird Germanic dialect. But one of them has something the other does not:
From A like Abba to Z as in ZZAJ Sweden has continuously exported a wide variety of pop music over the years. Some were one-hit wonders, some were brilliant, and some were just way ahead of their time.
Which to me is the only possible explanation why the complete works of the “Army of Lovers” gets so little spotlight these days.
While one might argue that the original concept of “Boy Bands” probably dates as far back as the 19th century Barbershop Quartets, in the 1960s the concept took on a new facet, when “The Monkees” were drafted – as opposed to bands who formed themselves. This turned out to be quite a lucrative formula and so over time other bands were created with the specific goal of luring in the cash of teenage girls, most famously The New Kids on The Block, Take That, Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, or in newer times, One Direction. However, when two English blokes tried to apply the concept to a female band back in 1994 everything turned out a bit different.
They found their five members easily enough, having received hundreds of applications and only one of them was replaced by the time the group was ready to start recording. But… being the ambitious talents they were, the girls soon became frustrated with their management’s unwillingness to take on their ideas and parted ways, in order to full-fill their own artistic visions.
The principle would be applied more than once over the span of their career, not least when it came to the video of “Wannabe”, their first single. While considered flawed in several ways (“lighting!”, “old guys!”, “nipples!?!”) by Virgin, their new marketing channel, the Spice Girls insisted they did not want to do a re-shoot, and the commercial success would most definitely prove them right.
