Archive for the ‘Music videos’ Category
The massive double standard of rap lyrics
Everyone (or rather everyone who’s an SJW) is hating on some white baseball player who tweeted quotes from rap lyrics years ago when he was some prole kid in high school.
But there’s absolutely no hate at all for the actual rap musicians propagating their disgusting songs in the first place.
The Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star (Live 2004)
This is maybe the best concert video I’ve ever seen. One of the most iconic one-hit wonders, The Buggles, play their first live concert 25 years after recording the song whose music video became the first video ever played on MTV.
I like this live rendition better than the original studio recording. The lead singer is more mellow, and his voice is better without the tacky “futuristic” sound effects.
This was at an event sponsored by Prince Charles’ charity, which is why you see Prince Charles in the first row.
The Go-Go’s – Our Lips Are Sealed
A commenter said that I only feature Go-Go’s imitator groups and never the Go-Go’s themselves. Although once I did feature post-Go-Go’s Belinda Carlisle. See here.
Mainly, the reason is that there aren’t any good Go-Go’s music videos on YouTube. The Bangles, who came a few years later than the Go-Go’s, did much better music videos. Like Manic Monday.
The best Go-Go’s video on YouTube is this one, and there’s nothing special about it, just the four of them driving around L.A. in a convertible interspersed with performance footage. Of course they have great eighties hair! And Belinda Carlisle does look so cute, like the slightly zaftig girl next door who got a slutty makeover and got drugged up. Wow! (Back the the good old days when being slutty didn’t mean having disgusting tattoos.)
The Go-Gos are to be commended for being a real girl band, they played their own instruments, wrote their own songs. Which is rather uncommon. Girls are great at singing and performing, but less good at playing musical instruments, and generally not good at all at composing music and writing songs. For example, the Bangles best song, “Manic Monday,” was written by Prince. And their other big hit, “Walk Like an Egyptian,” was written by Liam Sternberg. And they did a really great cover of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Hazy Shade of Winter.” And Going Down to Liverpool was also a cover.
Bananarama – Cruel Summer
This is a good music video for Memorial Day weekend, the cultural beginning of summer.
Bananarama’s two best songs are this one, and “Robert De Niro’s Waiting” (which I previously blogged about). I always hated their most-overplayed song, “Venus.”
“Cruel Summer” was previously featured here in the clip from the Karate Kid, but the music video is even better.
I don’t understand the theme that they are auto mechanics. I don’t understand why there are cops at the end, or why one of the cops is wearing a white cowboy hat. But there are great scenes of Manhattan and great eighties hair. Sara Dallin, the group’s founder, has a hard look about her, but the other two girls in the group are so cute in this video.
High school never ends
A music video for GondwanaMan who writes in a comment:
#1 rule of life: all relationships are transactional. People only want to hang out with other people of their social status or better, so as to maintain or improve their status. I’m that sense, high school never really ends.
I love Bowling for Soup! (Except for the last scene in the video which is kind of gross.)
The Bangles – Going Down to Liverpool, starring Leonard Nimoy!
This is a cover of a song originally by the British group Katrina and the Waves about hardcore unemployment in the England. A weird subject for an all-girl eighties pop-band from the other side of the pond. The “UB-40” mentioned in the song was a U.K. unemployment form.
The music video has nothing to do with the lyrics, but it’s notable because it stars Leonard Nimoy as the annoyed but otherwise emotionless taxi driver!
Susanna Hoffs looks gorgeous as usual, even though her eighties hair is more tame here than she wore it a year later. This video demonstrates the evolution of big hair!
Leonard Nimoy – The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins
I never knew this existed until I found it yesterday surfing the web. Why has this been kept hidden for so long?
The Bangles – Manic Monday
A music video for Monday morning. This song was written for the Bangles by Prince. It deals with the bad feelings on Monday morning when you have go to a crappy job for five days before you get another two days of fun and relief from work.
But imagine how much different it was to go to work in 1985. On the train to work, everyone was reading an actual newspaper, because there were no smartphones or e-books or anything else like that. This allowed you to pick out everyone’s social class based on what newspaper they were reading. The Daily News and the New York Post were read by proles, and the higher classes read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
People wore suits to work too! That business casual thing was still another decade away.
When you got to work, there were no computers. Imagine that. An office where everyone was doing some kind of office work, but they weren’t doing it on computers. It kind of makes you wonder what people did all day with no computer in front of them and no emails to read.
Also, although the technology for conference calls existed in 1985, I don’t think they were popular back then. When people had a meeting, they had to physically go into a meeting room. And how did people know there was a meeting? They received a written memo in the morning!
If you needed something typed, you would write it down on paper, and then bring it to the typing pool (possibly the only place in the office where there were computer monitors) where someone would type it for you (unless you were important enough to have your own secretary). This system guaranteed at least a lower-middle-class salary for anyone (mostly women, but men also) who would bother to learn how to type fast enough to qualify as a typist. Today, there are no skills like that where you can learn it at home and then automatically get a job, even though it was a non-self-actualizing job that would lead to carpal tunnel syndrome.
But the best part of going to work in the 1980s was that all the girls in the office had eighties hair! Like the girls in the music video. What a delight to look at eighties hair all day!
The second-best part of going to work in the 1980s is that there was no IT department full of Indians most of whom have hard-to-understand accents and some of whom have disgusting body odor.
Anti-feminist song: Charlene – I’ve Never Been To Me
I remember this song from the radio in the 1980s, but can’t say I’ve ever actually listened to it until now. What a strong anti-feminist message! The song tells the story, in first person, of a woman who slutted it up as a mistress to a string of rich men, having abortions along the way when she became pregnant, and now looks back with great regret that she didn’t settle down with a beta-male provider and have children. But zero regrets about not having a career.
