Top of the hour: MTV does a 30-second station ID. The network had retired the classic astronaut footage by 1988, but kept the theme song. This spot is a nifty piece of animation featuring the MTV logo in a gyroscope, with close-ups on doors and windows opening up all over the logo, revealing naked bicycle riders and barking dogs and such.

On to our second hour of videos, starting with Natalie Cole’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.” A few words in praise of cover versions: they’re one of the few aspects of our current copyright system that just plain works. For decades now, if you want to cover somebody else’s song, for reasons inspired or banal, you can just do it. The songwriter gets a reasonable royalty, and you get to show your stuff.

“Pink Cadillac” was a funny rockabilly song, the B-side to “Dancing in the Dark.” On New York City radio, at least, it got heavy airplay in the summer of 1984. Natalie Cole, who’s always been a generic R&B singer, gives the song a generic pop-house feel; the track is a lightweight cousin to Aretha Franklin’s “Freeway of Love.” In the narrow category of “female R&B singers doing Bruce Springsteen compositions,” this single ranks behind the Pointer Sisters’ “Fire” and Donna Summer’s “Protection.”

The video starts off in black and white, with some key items colorized, a high-tech effect in 1988 also employed in Hershey’s commercials and Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” video (which I’m sure we’ll see later in this countdown.) The most famous example of the technique is probably from five years later: the little girl in the red dress in Schindler’s List. (For me, at least, the use of colorization in videos like this blunted some of the horror in Spielberg’s film.)

We’re in an old-fashioned gas station, with a couple of guys leaning over the hood, trying to get a car started. One of them has a bright blue bandanna hanging out of his left pocket. According to the hanky code of the 1970s, this means he’s a gay man looking to engage in 69. His desires will not be fulfilled in this video, I’m afraid.

A white guy cruises up the pumps in a Cadillac convertible, a car that is apparently so astonishing that the black mechanics just point and stare. Its owner is a greaser type in a leather jacket; he starts talking to another white guy with a similar look. The car catches the eye of Natalie Cole, who is in the gas station for reasons unknown, wearing a leather jacket and hoop earrings. The mechanics get extremely excited and start dancing, shimmying from side to side. Cole strides towards the car, pushing away Greaser #2 en route.

Cole touches the Cadillac and, mirable dictu, it turns pink. (It appears to be a particularly sickly coral shade, but I’m going to chalk that up to the ravages of two decades on my videotape.) Meanwhile, Greaser #2 collects the three auto mechanics, and they all return to the Cadillac so that they can boogie around it and rub their thighs against it.

Four girls in a jeep roll into the gas station, and the video shifts to full color, the better to show them off. The girls look like they came straight from Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” video, seeking political asylum as refugees from a hairspray-intensive war zone. The auto mechanics are eye-poppingly excited to have girls to dance with. One passenger in the jeep, a white girl in denim, is also overstimulated: she writhes on the hood of the jeep, in a mini-tribute to Tawny Kitaen’s star turn the previous year in Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” video.

Inevitably, the four girls and four guys do a dance routine together, partnering up based on ethnicity. Cole joins the dance, and then struts over to the Cadillac. (The video briefly flickers back to black and white, to remind us of the good times we all had ninety seconds ago.) Cole sits on the Cadillac’s hood while the girls push it backwards, into the part of the garage labeled “LUBRICATION.” The gas station also has an early-’80s Coca-Cola billboard, with a pile of tires put in front of it to obscure the “Coke is it!” slogan.

Greaser #1 (the Cadillac’s owner) watches the dancers from the sidelines, fondling a bottle of soda in an unsubtle fashion, gazing longingly, twisting his hands back and forth. The girls start lip-synching the backup vocals for Cole, using the nozzles of the gas pumps as simulated microphones. They’re rendered in black and white, except for their lipstick. More dancing, getting ever sassier. Cole wanders through the scene like ZZ Top in their videos, the facilitator of automobile-related sexual hijinks. The Cadillac’s owner keeps fondling that soda, getting more excited, noticing only at the last moment that Cole is driving off in his car.

“Pink Cadillac” hit #5, one of only two singles by Cole to get that high on the pop charts (the other being 1977’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind”). The video isn’t on YouTube, although there is this clip of Cole performing the song on an awards show. Interestingly, somebody at YouTube has put up audio of the original Springsteen demo (from the Nebraska sessions).

posted 8 July 2008 in 1988. 4 comments

I’ve been listening to U2’s “I Will Follow” for over 25 years (not continuously). But only recently did I pay attention to this lyric:

Your eyes make a circle

Two eyes, of course, make a line.

So I am forced to conclude that the person whom Bono is addressing has more than two eyes. Actually, since three eyes make a triangle and four eyes, however you position them, don’t really look circular, I think he must be singing to somebody with, at a bare minimum, five eyes.

posted 7 July 2008 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

The entire staff of Rule Forty-Two HQ wishes you a happy Fourth of July.

From those benches, you can see the Statue of Liberty.

posted 4 July 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

If you’re just joining us, here’s the deal: I unearthed some old videotapes that contain the entirety of MTV’s year-end countdown from 1988. I haven’t watched them since 12/31/88, but I’m slowly rolling through them now, writing about the videos (yes, MTV used to play videos) and the ads and VJ segments.

Since we’ve made it through ten of the videos (and one hour of the countdown), this seems like an opportune moment to provide links for the new arrivals and remember the good times from these past two months.

#91: Eric Carmen, “Hungry Eyes”

#92: Pet Shop Boys, “Always on My Mind”

#93: Cher, “I Found Someone”

#94: Michael Jackson, “Another Part of Me”

#95: The Bangles, “In Your Room”

#96: Glenn Frey, “True Love”

#97: Rick Astley, “Together Forever”

#98: Vixen, “Edge of a Broken Heart”

#99: Crowded House, “Better Be Home Soon”

#100: Keith Richards, “Take It So Hard”

Plus:

An introduction to the project

Commercial Break #1

Commercial Break #2

Commercial Break #3

Commercial Break #4

A video not on the countdown that MTV played anyway: Def Leppard, “Armageddon It”

A note on the absence of Debbie Gibson’s “Foolish Beat”

YouTube links for Keith Richards and Crowded House (all other YouTube links are included with the post on the relevant video)

posted 3 July 2008 in 1988, Self-reflexive. no comments yet

As you may have heard, Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, comes out next week. (A couple of months ago, I interviewed Beck and wrote a short preview of the album. Beck’s changed some of the song titles since then; after some back and forth, “Beggar’s Shoes” became “Gamma Ray.”) I thought this would be a fine time to add another Beck article to the archives: at the beginning of this year, he and I sat down for over an hour to discuss Odelay, the details of how he made it with the Dust Brothers, and many of the bonus tracks included on the recent deluxe edition. Which, as I told friends at the time, was really the ideal topic for a long conversation with Beck.

“I had all these Moog synthesizers,” Beck told me. “The only people using them were Stereolab and a couple of indie bands, so you could go to pawn shops and get them for sixty bucks. I had a pile of them and I’d bring one in and use it until it broke, and then go get another one.”

The version printed in Rolling Stone some months ago was truncated for space reasons, but there’s no reason not to enjoy the whole magillah. (Obviously, the unnamed producer in the article is Danger Mouse.)

posted 2 July 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

As previously noted, deciphering the plot of a movie from an associated music video is a subtle art. My best guess on It Couldn’t Happen Here: the Pet Shop Boys drive around England, picking up hitchhikers and ultimately becoming professional tour guides, leading paying customers around the United Kingdom by train and by plane.

I’ve never seen Dirty Dancing, some scenes of which are contained within the video for Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes.” Here’s what we’re shown of the movie: Patrick Swayze dancing with Jennifer Grey, while a blonde girl stands behind Grey with her hands on her hips, moving in time with them. It’s presumably a dance lesson designed to rev up the three-way sexual tension. The next clip: Grey swaying with a shirtless Swayze. Soon, she’s taken off her shirt too (revealing a reasonably demure bra), arching her back as far as the human spine will allow. They start kissing. We switch to soft-focus backlighting as they get intimate.

As far as I can tell from this video, Dirty Dancing was a porn movie. There was a fig-leaf of plot involving dance instruction, and then a three-way that didn’t make it into this video, and then later, a hardcore scene between Swayze and Grey, and presumably after that, some girl-on-girl action.

The rest of the “Hungry Eyes” video: Eric Carmen is sitting in a darkened room, watching a 16-mm print of Dirty Dancing, wondering where all his Raspberries royalties went. (In theory, the Raspberries seem like the sort of band I should love, but I’ve never clicked with them. I recently learned that after the Raspberries’ demise, Carmen continued as a songwriter, placing “Almost Paradise,” sung by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson, on the Footloose soundtrack in 1984. So this hit and “Make Me Lose Control,” both (see comments for correction) on the eleven-million-selling (!!) Dirty Dancing soundtrack marked the fusion of the two stages of his career and, presumably, set him up for life financially.) The Dirty Dancing footage ends, and Carmen stands before the white light of the projector. He opens a window as footage of himself is projected on the wall, giving the whole scene a bit of a Norma Desmond tint, made stranger by the fact that he looks less like a star reliving his glory days and more like a lawyer who hasn’t quite made partner yet.

Cut to a blondish white girl in a black evening dress with a plunging neckline and off-the-shoulder straps. She’s gathering red flowers. In an abrupt non-continuity cut (not the last one in this video), she’s suddenly wearing a red satin jacket and caressing her own collarbone, with her fingers then sliding down between her breasts. Her lips are parted. The editing suggests that she’s just outside Carmen’s window, but then she’s projected against his own wall (without the jacket, but with long silver gloves), leaning beneath the red flowers. She steps forward in the projected film, and then steps into the frame with Carmen and touches his face. She walks out the door, vanishing into thin air as she goes. He takes it all in stride: presumably he’s been having these hallucinations for a while.

The song, by the way, is catchy but dull, a churning midtempo pop number notable only for the phrase “I’ve got hungry eyes / I’ve got you in my sights,” which makes for a ballistic/cannibalistic twist on what would otherwise be utterly standard lyrics about gazing longingly upon a desired one.

We hit the chorus, and footage of Carmen singing is projected on a big outside wall. (This video appears to have been shot in a single night in some industrial district.) Beneath the Eric-O-Vision is a hastily art-directed “nightclub,” so denoted by a couple of potted trees and a striped awning. Carmen strolls under the awning, where there are neon signs reading “Cerveza,” “Disco,” and “Club Entrance.” The fantasy girl spins around, hugging a brick wall, and then shimmies against a white background, and gazes longingly into the camera while artificial rain falls behind her. She pulls on her hair. The camera comes in for an extreme closeup on her throat.

The fantasy girl appears outside the club, now wearing a gold evening dress that barely contains her cleavage. In front of the fake rain, she puts her hands on her hips. Footage of her alternates the gold outfit with the black outfit. Carmen stands on a staircase, hands behind his back, lip-synching. For the song’s saxophone solo, the fantasy girl appears with a sax, allegedly playing along–although she doesn’t seem to be moving her fingers at any point.

Across the parking lot from the “nightclub,” Carmen sits in the “charming outdoor café,” so denoted by the checkered tablecloths and the neon sign saying “Café.” His table has no plates or silverware, but does feature a small candle. There’s a statuesque blonde girl sitting across from him. Carmen looks across the industrial zone and sees his fantasy girl, who has wrapped herself around an aging guy with sunglasses and a mustache, who is either her pimp or Stan Lee. She kisses him, and when she breaks the kiss, she is a different girl, an Asian one.

The video ends with Carmen sitting alone with his projector again, meditating on the patriarchal gaze.

“Hungry Eyes” peaked at #4 on the Billboard charts in early 1988. You can watch it here.

posted 1 July 2008 in 1988. 6 comments

The second season of everybody’s favorite new TV show, Mad Men, starts July 27 on AMC. I recently visited the show and saw the capacious set of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency: the desks had IBM Selectric typewriters, the ashtrays were filled with lipstick-stained cigarette butts, and the secretaries were wearing tight dresses and foundation garments. “We all have girdles and weird garters,” said Christina Hendricks, who plays office vixen Joan. “You have no idea how uncomfortable I am right now. It’s like my inner organs are slowly being shifted.”

I wrote a short preview of the new season for Rolling Stone. It’s now up on their website here.

posted 30 June 2008 in Outside. 2 comments

This is a little embarrassing. When I moved across the country last year, I misplaced some of the notes and supporting materials relating to my flipwalks. Specifically, I don’t seem to have any information on flipwalks #28, 29, and 30. (I do have a notebook that seems to have all my notes on flipwalks 31 through 48, happily–so if I can read my three-year-old handwriting, I’ll be in business again after this hiccup.)

As a side effect, I jumbled a few photos: the one previously attached to walk #27 actually belongs with walk #28, so I’ve moved it there and put up the proper photo for #27. The moral of the story is obviously “don’t wait three years to finish artistic projects,” but we already knew that, right? So these new flipwalks lack the usual essay– I didn’t want to delay them any further, but if I turn up any material at a future point, I’ll add that.

As usual, the thumbnails below are teasers: hit the links to see the full photos.

Walk #27 has a new, corrected picture this week. (If for some reason you get the old one, just try refreshing your browser.)

Walk #28 is where that old picture now lives.

That’s Walk #29.

And that’s Walk #30. All four pictures were from February 2005.

posted 27 June 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

I’m on the road today, so you’ll have to wait until next Tuesday to find out what the #91 video is. But I’ll take the opportunity to tell you about one song that isn’t on this countdown at all: Debbie Gibson’s “Foolish Beat.” The ballad hit #1 on the Billboard singles chart in June 1988, and did even better on MTV, ruling the countdown show Dial MTV for weeks on end. So why wasn’t it anywhere in the network’s top 100 videos of the year? The best theory my friends and I came up with on that New Year’s Eve (after our outrage simmered down a bit) was that the channel had no good place to put it on the countdown. By rights, it should have been in the top ten, but they presumably believed it wasn’t a hip enough song to warrant that placement. (We’ll revisit that judgment when we hit the actual top ten.) But if it was much lower, it would have been obvious that the fix was in. So they left it off altogether, assuming that nobody would be obsessive enough to watch the entire top hundred, and that reasonable people would assume that an unseen video was in a part of the countdown that they missed. Well, we showed them. Never underestimate the obsession of music geeks (or the willingness of MTV to cook the books).

posted 26 June 2008 in 1988. 4 comments

It’s a law of rock that a supergroup will split up superacrimoniously, and you’ve probably heard that’s what happened this year with Velvet Revolver: Scott Weiland ditched the band to return to Stone Temple Pilots, leaving the rest of the group to look for a lead singer again (and bat away rumors that they’d reunite with Axl Rose). So with STP currently on the road, however rockily, I thought it’d be a fine time to put this article in the archives: a Velvet Revolver profile I wrote back in 2004, before they hated each other. (Fans take sides too: the audience at one show I attended started chanting “Fuck Axl!” Slash’s response: “Is that really necessary?”) In the four years after this article was published, Weiland’s troubles with addiction, rehab, and arrests recurred. And Chinese Democracy still hasn’t come out.

posted 25 June 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet