Some bad music videos, part II

At the last BQT, I posed this query:

As suggested by its lyrics, what year did Asia release the song “Heat of the Moment”?


Slight caveat to this: Asia frontman John Wetton claims that the number in the lyrics does not refer to the year, it refers to some kind of place, and the accuracy is a coincidence. Oh, those wacky British prog rockers!

I had this song on the brain because…well, I often have it on the brain, I think it's a brilliant piece of songwriting and performance (though some people do like to mock it). I always seem to enjoy shifting time signatures in rock & roll, and Asia was blessed with some sterling musicianship. And recently, I went back and watched the video:




I want to love this: that whole flipping-squares thing is kind of cool, in an elegantly low-tech way, and there's some intriguing imagery. Plus, compare it with most music videos at the time, and the whole production is pretty slick (not unlike Asia's debut album). But here's the problem (apart from guitarist Steve Howe being a strong contender for the next "World's Ugliest Musicians" video round): It's so literal. We start with a spinning globe stopping on Asia, of course. Soon after: "A look from you" (woman looks to the side) "and I would fall from grace" (her hands are joined in prayer) "and that would wipe the small right from my face" (a smile is almost literally wiped from a man's face). Then the chorus: "It was the heat" (the word "heat" is branded into wood) "of the moment" (clocks) "telling me what my heart meant" (EKG monitor). It goes on like this.

MTV changed everything, and part of the problem is that musicians, who were accustomed to being audio performers and not visual ones, had to adjust, quickly and sometimes awkwardly. Many of them flailed around for the best ideas they could find, and I imagine the guys in Asia didn't have the graphic sense to think beyond the most basic idea for how to visualize this song. Some blame should also rest with the directors, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, former members of 10cc, who went on to make a lot of the best music videos of the 1980s; clearly, they were only just starting to figure it out here. The result is an somewhat embarrassingly primitive clip that cuts against the polished musicianship of the song itself.

Another thing you see a lot in early music videos was a palpable discomfort on the part of the musicians themselves. I remember being nine years old, in school, and the teacher, for some reason, had a video camera and filmed a few minutes of fourth grade in action. We all had watched TV till our eyes had melted, but I bet most of us had never seen an actual video camera before, certainly hadn't been filmed. We were smiling nervously, laughing like idiots. We just didn't know how to act in front of a camera.

That effect is on display on a lot of early videos. Here's an artifact: One of the first videos to be shown on MTV, "Hold on to the Night," by Baltimore generic-rockers Bootcamp.





First, this is just a dreadful song (no, Mr. Perm, you cannot sing, and when I heard the line "Sometimes lonely but never along," I just knew the rhyme would be "danger zone"). But there is just no imagination in the video, and the band members are making complete asses of themselves goofing around like self-conscious nine-year-olds. I picture the director saying, "Okay, fellas, we've blocked off the street, sent all the hookers home: Here are your unplugged instruments, the camera's on: Do something!" They don't even give the drummer his kit, and the keytar guy puts it in his jacket when he's done playing it. I'd say it's good that at least they look like they're having fun, but I don't think they are—they look incredibly uncomfortable to me.


Enough crappy videos for now. I still plan to get back to my "Greatest Hits" blog series at some point, and I want to write up the recent, long-awaited DVD release of The T.A.M.I. Show. Better music is coming.

Some bad music videos, part I

I've had crappy music videos on the mind. Come join me, will you not?





Billy Ocean…that guy had a zillion hits during the '80s, sold an insane number of records, yet he's all but forgotten, minus the occasional appearance of "Caribbean Queen" on a compilation CD, slotted between "The Warrior" and "Goody Two Shoes." I just had an epic weekend of nerdiness, trading pop culture tidbits with a member of Team! The Musical, and "Caribbean Queen" came into the mix ("it's simply…awesome"). We talked about the B.Osh, what little we could recall—I remembered his real name (Leslie Charles, from Trinidad), but I got an intriguing trivia factoid wrong: I had believed he started as a touring bassist for Sting, but it was sort of the other way around; Sting considered ditching the Police early on for a job playing bass for the O-Man (makes sense, since Sting wasn't solo till after the O'ster hit it big).

And I mentioned CQ's follow-up single, "Loverboy." No one seems to remember this, even though it hit No. 2 in 1985. But I did recall the video. And I watched it again for the first time in decades. Errh…

What junk this is. I'm picturing Billy Ocean's handlers (a guy like that has lots of handlers), in the brainstorming session: "Listen, Billy, you're a star! We're gonna take you to the stars! Have you heard about this thing all the kids love, this Star Wars thing?" Never mind that Return of the Jedi was two years gone at this point, and the Cantina scene (which this video is clearly imitating) was going on a decade old.

And man, this is stupid looking. We have an expressionless two-legged tauntaun, eying a character from the Dark Crystal, who's apparently making time with a cross between a puffer fish and Joseph Merrick. Meanwhile, a bunch of extras are walking around aimlessly in lame costumes: there's TV Head, 1960s American Astronaut Stereotype, Crow T. Robot's prototype, Jabba the Hut's uglier cousin, and Octavo the clown from Scarface. Intermittently, we see Billy singing in an abandoned hookah bar, visible via floating pyramid. What's going on here? Tauntaun wants Dark Crystal, so he goes all Greedo on Puffer Merrick, forcibly grabs her, she puts up minimal resistance, then they escape to the beach from the end of Planet of the Apes as a trio of dollar-store Jawas sing along. What does this have to do with the song? What does this have to do with anything???

The Ocean-ographer, it turns out, still tours and records, a little more successful in the U.K. than here, and he seems to have cachet among a lot of R&B stars as a crossover-success elder statesman. Nearly every musician who was around in the '80s has something to be embarrassed about, but the "Loverboy" video is really the bottom of the barrel. And this from a guy who would later record "Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car"! Sting made the right move.

Tomorrow: In the early days of MTV, musicians really didn't know how to make videos, how to deal with the camera being on. Stay tuned for the silly results.