{"id":656,"date":"2006-07-22T00:00:14","date_gmt":"2006-07-22T05:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=656"},"modified":"2025-10-10T15:41:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:41:53","slug":"entry-81","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=656","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Morning Videos?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><style type=\"text\/css\">\n\t<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } A:link { so-language: zxx } --><br \/>\t<\/style><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What do you do when you pop wide awake at 3:00 in the morning? Catch up on a friend\u2019s posts about favorite music videos and make one of your own, of course. \ud83d\ude42 <a href=\"http:\/\/granades.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stephen<\/a> has been daring me for a few weeks now to chime in with some of my picks, so here we go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Ijk4j-r7qPA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><b>Franz Ferdinand: Take Me Out (2004)<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u201cI know I won\u2019t be leaving here.\u201d It makes the video almost hypnotic and the song infinitely more interesting to me. Bravo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lqAOB143KqY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><b>Debbie Gibson: Electric Youth (1989)<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019t 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 \u201cgreened up\u201d the program then, and I did it again when the video showed up the other day. I\u2019ve watched this thing way more times than I\u2019m comfortable sharing with you. Some of it is undoubtedly the residual crush-nostalgia, but there\u2019s more. Yes, it\u2019s a completely random video full of cheesy 80\u2019s choreography. No, nothing in the video seems to tie into the meaning of the song at all (what\u2019s 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\u2019s image, and they did a brilliant job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Maybe it\u2019s 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 <u>real<\/u> 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 \u201cmore of a person\u201d peering out from behind that face. *shrug* I may just be projecting, but I\u2019m really big on reading personality and intelligence from people\u2019s eyes, smiles, facial expressions, etc., and I\u2019m usually pretty close. Another thing I notice here: even re-calibrating for the late 80\u2019s, Gibson\u2019s outfits in the video were quite tame. They could have gone for the overtly provocative angle, and they didn\u2019t. They waited for <a rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allmusic.com\/cg\/amg.dll?p=amg&amp;sql=10:lg0e4jo70wal\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Anything Is Possible<\/i><\/a> for that.&nbsp; \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 (\u201dDon\u2019t you see a strong resemblance\u2026\u201d). I really like the \u201cstages of Debbie\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally, the music geek stuff. There\u2019s no way those trumpet fingering changes we see at the beginning go with what we\u2019re hearing (but then again, there\u2019s no way that what we\u2019re hearing is a real trumpet anyway). \ud83d\ude42 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 \u201cA\u201d is the verse and \u201cB\u201d is the chorus, \u201cABABB\u201d is pretty typical. Maybe \u201cABABCB\u201d with &#8220;C&#8221; as the bridge. This one, however, actually has two bridges, and the second one is in two distinct sections. It\u2019s more like \u201cABABCBDEBB\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do you do when you pop wide awake at 3:00 in the morning? Catch up on a friend\u2019s posts about favorite music videos and make one of your own, of course. \ud83d\ude42 Stephen has been daring me for a few weeks now to chime in with some of my picks, so here we go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1731,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions\/1731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}