Can a video be both parody and tribute all at the same time?

Scissor Sisters: Land of a Thousand Words (2006)

I'm not enough of a James Bond film fan to pick up all the references, I'm sure, but I got enough to really get a kick out of this video.

I don't think I'm up to anything particularly deep tonight, but I just tonight figured out the perfect pair of videos for my mood. So much of video making is about poses and art and such. It's really cool every once in a while to see someone having fun in a video. Tonight's pair are all about people that look like they're having a lot of fun. Pretty much the only reason I love watching these two videos is for the facial expressions. Read more »

Tonight's picks are inspired by the episode of VH1 Classic's All Request Hour. Someone actually requested this next one: Julie Brown: The Homecoming Queen Has Got A Gun (1987) (link defunct) The song and video almost remind me of a Ray Stevens song, except not as funny. :) So, why not go from the prom queen to cheerleaders? Toni Basil: Mickey (1981) (link defunct) Ah, the one-hit-wonder choreographer. Read more »

I'm being a bit lazy tonight with these picks. Neither is exactly unknown, but they both just kinda strike my fancy.

Gorillaz: Feel Good Inc. (2005)

The concept of a "virtual hip hop group" fascinates me way more than it should. The people behind this music (who include two former members of the Talking Heads, BTW) have gone to great lengths to create an entire world around the virtual band members. There's even a flash website game that lets you navigate where the band members live.

All of the videos I've seen so far have pretty much fallen into the can't-look-away category, but I like this one best. I think it's a combination of the music itself and Murdoc (the bass player) in the video. The animation of him playing the bass fascinates me. As usual, the jerkiness of the compressed video gets in the way. Oh well.

They Might Be Giants: Ana Ng (1989)

I'm cheating a bit on this one, because it's in the "100 greatest" post that Stephen referenced when he started all this. I can't help it that other people have good taste, though. :) The comment there that I love is that this video "stars the Johns' teeth". It's so true. That and the dance. I've seen variations on the dance show up in a few of their videos.

I've never looked it up, but I'm fairly sure the set is on a firefighters' training ground (plain brick buildings with big single-digit numbers tend to give it away). This is yet another one where the video works better if it's properly keeping up with the music. So many of the visuals (including the teeth and the dance) line up with the song's beat.

What do you do when you pop wide awake at 3:00 in the morning? Catch up on a friend's posts about favorite music videos and make one of your own, of course. :) Stephen has been daring me for a few weeks now to chime in with some of my picks, so here we go.

Franz Ferdinand: Take Me Out (2004)

I think this video is utterly brilliant. Not because of the piles of money they undoubtedly spent on the animation, but because whoever wrote it intimately understood what makes this song tick: that relentless downbeat and the repeated song structure. The song is all about hook, and almost every element of the video is a visual mirror of an audible hook in the song: the dots and expanding concentric circles in the intro; the pounding machine, punching bag, gyrating blocks, etc.; and the repeated zoom out sequences almost every time they sing "I know I won't be leaving here." It makes the video almost hypnotic and the song infinitely more interesting to me. Bravo.

Debbie Gibson: Electric Youth (1989)

I know. Go ahead and have your laugh. I had a serious crush on this girl back in junior high school. I owned a copy of the album named after this song, and I practically wore the tape out. The odd thing is that since I didn't have cable or satellite TV growing up, the first time I saw this video was something like a year and a half ago. TiVo caught it during one of the video programs on VH1 Classic. I "greened up" the program then, and I did it again when the video showed up the other day. I've watched this thing way more times than I'm comfortable sharing with you. Some of it is undoubtedly the residual crush-nostalgia, but there's more. Yes, it's a completely random video full of cheesy 80's choreography. No, nothing in the video seems to tie into the meaning of the song at all (what's up with the styrofoam castle set?). Even so, this video shares something with Take Me Out: the writer knew what he/she was selling. In this case, it was Gibson's image, and they did a brilliant job.

Maybe it's just because I know how much of her own work Gibson did on her music (wrote, sang, played instruments, produced), but she just seems to come across as so real in this video. I compare her in this video to other teen-fad girl pop singers both then and later (Tiffany and Brittany Spears are examples), and there just seems to be so much "more of a person" staring out from behind that face. *shrug* I may just be projecting, but I'm really big on reading personality and intelligence from people's eyes, smiles, facial expressions, etc., and I'm usually pretty close. Another thing I notice here: even recalibrating for the late 80's, Gibson's outfits in the video were quite tame. They could have gone for the overtly provocative angle, and they didn't. They waited for Anything Is Possible for that. :)

Other things that stand out to me: they did a great job of posing and framing her for greatest effect. The first bridge (the one with the blue laser show) caught her in some really good angles, especially the profile shot with the spinning laser beams radiating from behind her head ("Don't you see a strong resemblance..."). I really like the "stages of Debbie" trick they pull a couple of times in the video, with the two younger girls being cut in to apparently represent her growing up. Cute touch.

Finally, the music geek stuff. There's no way those trumpet fingering changes we see at the beginning go with what we're hearing (but then again, there's no way that what we're hearing is a real trumpet anyway). :) The song is unusually long and uniquely-structured for a teen pop hit. Most rock-based pop songs like this have a simple verse-chorus structure. If "A" is the verse and "B" is the chorus, "ABABB" is pretty typical. Maybe "ABABCB" if there's a bridge. This one, however, actually has two bridges, and the second one is in two distinct sections. It's more like "ABABCBDEBB".

I've been meaning for a while to post about a dilemma I've had.

It's sad when a good band gets sucked into the dark side by a video director with a "vision". Anyone can make a crappy video, but it's especially painful to me when it's a successful band that should know better. Even worse when it's a song I actually enjoy.

Given that narrowed definition, I've been debating which of two videos I've seen truly qualifies as the worst video ever... the one that does the most damage to a song I really like. Read more »