Flipping through the digital-cable programming guide, trying to find something to tidy up the apartment by, I settled on VH-1 Classic, the existence of which I had utterly forgotten despite various friends of mine extolling its virtues recently.

It probably goes without saying that not much tidying has gotten done. I came in right before the We Are The ’80s programming block got started and I really haven’t moved since, except to refill my coffee, which I did without taking my eyes off the screen, because an Italian restaurant’s tablecloth had assaulted Bob Geldof.

I graduated from high school in 1990, and I saw some of these videos a hundred times, probably. Obviously I never questioned the clothing, or the hair, or why the zombies in that Billy Idol song couldn’t just take the elevator instead of climbing the side of the building (actually, maybe they’re vampires, and come to think of it, I’m not sure Billy Idol wasn’t a vampire also…or maybe it had nothing to do with the undead…like so many videos of that era, it’s tough to say definitively what the hell is going on). I just watched them, even for songs I hated.

Some of the songs I grew to hate after the video had gone into heavy rotation for a few weeks. “I Don’t Like Mondays” isn’t one of those songs — frankly, I can’t remember having heard it before, ever, before today — and I can see why it got passed over for the dozen-airings-a-day treatment. Geldof is weirdly uncharismatic, he got trampled by Plaidzilla, and the other Boomtown Rats all have the fedora-perched-on-back-of-head/pajama-pants-with-high-top-Chucks combo going on. Brutal.

Flawless time capsule, though, really, of both Thatcher-era British set design — which apparently required mis-lighting the set and dressing it in mildewy beige flocked wallpaper — and of video storytelling at the dawn of MTV. Pose the band at seemingly random, but actually carefully Fibonacci’d, intervals in a large white room; angle the camera and pull in for a tight close-up while the band lip-synchs intensely and wears sunglasses; voila, post-heartbreak emotional death.

Another popular inspiration for ’80s videos: apocalypse. “99 Luft Balloons” is not a bad song, but it’s on every single ’80s compilation CD and is overplayed and annoying as a result, and the heavy-handed symbolism, coupled with the wedding-video-sponsored-by-ConAgra production values, make it seem longer and twee-er than it is already.

“99 Luft Balloons” (…look, that’s how the VH-1 brain trust spells it in the credits; don’t email me) also points up a leitmotif in ’80s videos, namely the impossible task of playing the keyboard believably. Take the average Bon Jovi offering: everyone is fake-playing their instruments, and by and large they can get away with it, because it’s the guitar, or the drums. Jon Bon is flying around on guy wires, Richie Sambora is hatha-yogaing away on the guitar solo, you know it’s not real but they can sell it. And then the camera cuts to David Bryan playing a D-major chord really hard and making a “hells yeah” face, each hand a pointedly tensed claw of deeply felt musical emotion all “I am Lord Vader and this bank of Casios is my pod, where I feel safe but so, so alone,” and it’s a keyboard, is the thing. If it’s an actual piano, I can let it go; the piano is in fact a percussion instrument and you do occasionally have to do a rocking fugue on the bench to get things done. You don’t have to do that with an ’80s keyboard that probably doesn’t have pressure-sensitivity technology yet.

So the Nena keyboarder has the unenviable job of selling us on the idea that his giant red Mad-Maxerchief is actually strangling him, so he must fight for his life — with a dominant-to-tonic progression! Go tell Aunt Rhody I’m kicking some fuckin’ ASS! Rrrrrrrrawhhh!

Dear sir: No.

As if reading my mind, the next video went lights-up with a moody shot of a real piano in a studio, and I said out loud, “This doesn’t look like the Bruce Hornsby videos I reme– holy shitballs, ‘Valotte’!”

Julian Lennon was a pretty major whoop back then, but I had forgotten “Valotte” entirely, although evidently that’s the name of the album. “Too Late For Goodbyes” was the one that took over for an entire season; I remember running laps in gym class while that song was reverberating all around me. (It’s not a fond memory.)

Whatever happened to this guy? The video is not anything to write home about, but the song isn’t bad of its era, and it’s just him singing, which is a refreshing change, ’80s-wise, from the “we’re standing angrily in a field, wearing neon trenchcoats and slippers that look like animal feet while surreal stuff happens in the background” visual vocab. He looked and sounded really startlingly like his father, so if Sir McCartney’s career could survive a decade of chintzily executed arrangements, why didn’t Julian Lennon’s?

…Shoes? Who the hell? I have never heard the song before in my life, and it’s decent, actually, but when did Jackson Browne and Mark Hamill have a kid together and make him the lead singer of a band?

Next up, the obligatory synthy adult-contempo ’80s love letter from a rehab-grad ’70s supergroup to their neglected kids from their first marriages, which will then become a wedding song and Rasputin its way into the culture: ELO’s “Telephone Line.” I have a lot of respect for Jeff Lynne as a producer and music-industry survivor, but he looks like someone dipped his head in a bowl of pubes, and the song is no “Don’t Bring Me Down,” God knows. And once again the keyboardist is running through 1,423 Faces To Make While Pinching A Loaf in alphabetical order, with the occasional page taken from Caught Jerking Off: A Memoir.

“The Heat of the Moment” is an excellent song, but VH-1 calling Asia “visionaries” is perhaps pushing it.

Aw, “Papa Don’t Preach.” That video was a huge effing deal at the time: Madonna coming out of the Material Girl phase and into the pneumatic-platinum era; videos that told stories or looked like short films instead of surrealist collaging; Issue Songs; actors in videos. I can’t remember exactly, but I think this one came out in ’86 or ’87, and you could tell even at the time that we were coming out of First-Term Reagan Eighties with the Nu-Ro and the green-screening and the post-punk, into the Bush I Eighties with the big hair and the lite metal and the tacit agreement to stop caring about the Eagles’ solo projects.

I don’t recall finding the father of Madge’s child hot before, but he is. He’s like one of those dudes down in Brighton Beach whose ten-dollar street-table sweater is so offensive that you don’t notice his face, and then you see that he’s a fox and you feel like inviting him on a date to the Gap. Green hoodie, my treat!

I do wonder who takes a pregnancy test under a girder of the BQE. Isn’t “the bathroom” the traditional venue for this? While she’s in there, she might look into a more aggressive facial depilation strategy, because that is some Groucho action right there. But the video really is a classic. We would never see this kind of verité set design now, her rundown kids’ bedroom with the giant Pink Panther toy.

Ohhhhhhhh dude. Cheap Trick’s “The Flame.” We literally could not escape this song in — damn, when did this come out? Summer of ’88? It might have been earlier than that, because I don’t remember anything else for sure from ’88 but goddamn Def Leppard, and this song came before that, I think. It’s a shite song and I hadn’t missed it, although props to the guy with the five-necked guitar, but man, did we have to sit through a lot of grainy b/w videos about how exhausting it is to rock and roll — this one, “Dead or Alive,” the whole band sitting around just gassed by the demands of fame. Hasn’t aged well.

Peter Gabriel looks so young in “Big Time.” Hugely famous, groundbreaking video for a Gabriel song I don’t dig that much, and it doesn’t seem like a big whoop anymore but they used to talk about this animation like it was Citizen Kane.

Diamond Dave, I miss your tight pants and kooky jumps. Still, “Jump” is a relatively boring video; I love the song, and Alex “Human Muppet” Van Halen bugging out in a drum set that looks like the Panopticon as envisioned by Keith Moon is pretty cool, but they should have a little movie with it. We don’t need all these loving close-ups of Eddie when he’s really not doing all that much. A video for “Eruption,” that I would watch all day. I already know David Lee Roth can do the splits.

Lita Ford and Ozzy = perfect time for a pee break. It’s nice to see Ozzy (and his perm) looking a little younger and more alert, but I never liked the song. I realized too late that I should have gutted this one out and gone to the bathroom during “The Longest Time,” in which Billy Joel and his high-school-reunion friends over-romanticize fifties doo-wop. And sing some of it in the men’s room. Obviously.

Sensing my irritation, the programmer threw out “Burning Down the House” next. It’s a pretty cool video that has aged well, just like the Heads themselves, and I’ve always loved David Byrne’s face superimposed on the house and the road and stuff.

Prince Featuring Sheena Easton: “U Got The Look.” Prince is amazing. He looks like a tiny, ugly girl, but he’s still hot. Surprisingly, I still like the song, too, although Sheila E’s outfit is a Category 5 disaster.

Contrast that with one of the stars of the next video, “The Reflex” — John Taylor, who looks like a big, pretty girl and is not that hot. All my friends loved that dude; if you went down a row of locker doors at school, it was John Taylor, John Taylor, John Taylor, Stefan Edberg, John Taylor, John Taylor, Emilio, John Taylor. I never got it; Simon LeBon wasn’t exactly lumberjack masculine with the sixteen studded belts over the Z Cavariccis, but at least he didn’t look like a Barbie, or one of those yellowing hairstyle cards in the front window of the salon nobody goes to in your neighborhood.

“China Girl” is less fucked up than I remembered, believe it or not. It’s strange to see it now, though, because this video was my introduction to David Bowie, which makes me sound Amish, but it came out when I was about eleven, and I genuinely had no clue about Bowie or what he’d done before. I just looked at this video all, “What is this Norwegian lady doing on my TV?” Of course, when he hucked that huge dream-sequence bowl of noodles into the air in slo-mo, I was unfazed, but I had context for that; I had no context for Bowie at that time.

I had no context for Rod Stewart, either, but the years since “Young Turks” haven’t really changed my mind. I hate Rod Stewart; his voice drives me bazoo, and always with the prancing, uch. Hate. MTV played “Young Turks,” and the one where he’s spying on that girl, non-stop for three years, and I still can’t take hearing either of them.

A phone call forced me to mute the TV for a little while, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see what I was missing, to wit: “Red Red Wine” (thank God), “Let Love Rule” (that’s an ’80s song? Really? …Hey, Lenny Kravitz was really cute), the VH-1 Storytellers version of “Miss Me Blind” (Boy George’s big-hat thing really has got to stop), and “Blue Jean” (more Bowie? Did he die or something?).

I hung up just in time for the interminable concert-footage version of “In Your Eyes.” Lord, that song. Peter Gabriel is wearing a dashiki-esque something or other, and while at least we’re spared any further lionization of Lloyd Dobler, Thinking Woman’s Stalker, the song is mercilessly overplayed as it is.

And you know, so was the next one, “Dancing In The Dark,” but I hadn’t actually seen the video in ten years, probably. I’d forgotten how good the song really is; we’d all gotten so sick of everything on the “Born in the USA” album by the time I went to college that I haven’t heard most of the tracks in fifteen years, at least, but this is a great song. And Bruce looks great. Young, really young, and wearing a really tight pair of jeans — he is not my thing, by and large, but he has a hot ass in this video. …And here’s Courteney. Hee, she’s got her jeans French-cuffed. Hilarious.

I think that if you took a poll of Americans around my age, and you asked them to name the first music video they could think of, as fast as they could, “Dancing In The Dark” would win. I don’t know why, quite, and I can think of plenty of other videos that people might name instead — “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Hot For Teacher” — but for whatever reason, I think that if you put people on the spot and asked them to name a video, more of them would name this one.

News of the disturbing: Rick Springfield is on tour with Loverboy, Eddie Money, and Scandal. I’ll just take this opportunity to observe that Mike Reno could use the cardio, from what I’ve seen lately, and to argue the case for Rick Springfield, because I own “The Best of Rick Springfield” — no surprise, given my “taste” in “music,” probably — and I have to tell you, it’s underrated. Well, not “Jessie’s Girl,” because we’re all so over that song that we’re under it, and “Taxi Dancing” is just inexcusable, but if you don’t own the album, you can’t listen to “Affair of the Heart,” and you certainly can’t rock out to “Affair of the Heart” in the car, and get busted doing so at a red light in your hometown, by another driver that you think you might actually know because she’s maybe friends with your mom, while you are belting the song like the Whiffenpoof bass section’s Vegas floor show, on a verse lyric that is, no lie, about how this woman bites Rick Springfield during her orgasms, and not a veiled lyric, either, like, there is literally zero doubt as to what he’s talking about, so you have two choices: you can step on the accelerator and veer into the gas station on the corner and kill yourself in a giant fireball, or you can roll down the window and continue singing the song to this lady who could be your mom’s friend like she’s the asshole for not singing along, punctuating the line “so don’t try to tell me you think it’s just physical” with an offended “stop compartmentalizing your feelings for Rick Springfield by listening to NPR, because you know you love him” finger-point. And obviously you do the second thing. And obviously by “you do” I mean “I did,” and that actually happened, and when I got to my parents’ house five minutes later, my mom was like, “Why is your face all red?”

My face is getting red again right now. Lord, that was ridiculous. No more ’80s music for me today.

September 18, 2006

Share!