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Rayon Vert wrote: Fri Nov 01, 2019 2:27 am

Lowry_Sam wrote: Tue Oct 22, 2019 12:50 pm25 Rolling Stones Undercover Of The Night [Julien Temple, 1983] The only memorable Stones video probably because its the only video in which they don't just play before the camera.

That's just not true (both statements in fact!). Most their videos has them performing to some degree, but plenty bring in a lot of other things besides, and sometimes altogether. Anybody Seen My Baby, Love Is Strong, Ride Em on Down, Sex Drive, Saint of Me, Like a Rolling Stone, are some that come to mind. The other two videos, also Temple-directed, from the 1983 Undecover album are also cases in point, and arguably equally memorable. If Undercover of the Night is the political thriller, She Was Hot is the raunchy (and amusing) sex comedy (with the great Anita Morris), and Too Much Blood the horror film, also fitting the lyrics to that song. All three videos have a seedy, grimy feel that fits the tone of that album.

Ok, perhaps I should have stated up until Undercover Of The Night was released. I guess I hadn't been familiar with many coming after that one. I remember the She Was Hot single coming out, but don't recall the video at all & don't recall Too Much Blood at all (as a single or video). They do have Julien Temple's stamp on them, but I do think Undercover Of The Night is the standout, and not only because it was the most popular of the songs from that album. The political content of the lyrics is matched well to the video & really makes it an outlier for MTV & videos w/ political content in that it alluded to a specific political issue (US interventionism in Central & South America in the 80s) rather than just a general sentiment (Ie. War is bad) Harlem Shuffle is the only other video that stands out in my memory (though it too features them playing).

Ugh, I forgot about this one. Would've placed high. Almost impossible for me to get through it, to be quite honest, hadn't seen it in years which is probably why it was out of my mind when it came time to put a list together for this.

Sorry to bump the thread after this project has come to an end but I was very amused by the Murder on the Dancefloor video where Sophie Ellis-Bextor Nancy Kerrigans a bunch of people in a dance contest for possession of a spangly pair of cha cha heels!

Also I had not realised that the original video for Safety Dance featured Medieval times set Morris Dancing! (Though I'm torn on whether that Deus Ex fan video was better)

First Aid Kit - It's a Shame (Official Video). Brilliant use of split screen, which is both visually interesting and thematically purposeful. A real pretty duet, sung by pretty girls with pretty voices. I could watch this over and over and over. Thank you, mysterious and beneficent youtube recommendation algorithm.

Jeanette - Porque Te Vas. A video of the song taken from German television, lightly intercut with brief clips from Cria Cuervos. Somebody has thoughtfully provided the words in English down in the comments.

Tanita Tikaram - Cathedral Song (Official Video). Another inexplicable but serendipitous offering from the algorithm. I'd never heard of Tanita Tikaram before. She has an unusual voice -- deep, smooth, comfortable -- and she enunciates more than most pop singers. The lyrics are unfathomable, and the video, which looks like a perfume commercial or animated travel brochure, bears who knows what relation to the song. But it's a beautiful song and a beautiful perfume conmmercial, so I'm happy.

And here's another one: I've just remembered about that first person perspective action sequence music video to Bad Motherfucker by Biting Elbows (NSFW, naturally), which got the director noticed by Timur Bekmambetov and the opportunity to expand it out into one of the weirdest feature debuts of the last decade, Hardcore Henry.

Four years later, the same director delivered this masterpiece for the Russian band Leningrad. The video is even fun to watch in reverse (so the events play out chronologically), especially since it emphasizes that the pony and monkey are the first to escape the carnage!

That's fantastic! I like that the girl at least partially responsible for all the chaos (but only as much as the monkey, the police SWAT team, the lighting technician and the gangsters are!) also bookends the action! And watching it in reverse did highlight that moment of the guy running out of the venue on fire being pursued by someone just holding a fire extinguisher like a club and not even trying to hose him down at all! (Don't tell anybody but for all of the many mandatory fire drills that I have been on in my employment, I would probably react in much the same way in the heat of the moment! :-$ )

This has sent me on an imdb trawl of Ilya Naishuller's listed music videos. In between Hardcore Henry and the Leningrad video that Roger Ryan notes is the first person heist to False Alarm by The Weeknd and the one minute short for Saatchi & Saatchi, The Medic.

The same year as The Tattoo Artist is another video for Leningrad, Voyage (I love the post traumatic flashbacks that keep intruding onto the present time partying, ruining the attempt to escape into empty hedonism with memories of what it took to get there, and what was lost along the way). And the next year in 2018 the third Leningrad video is sci-fi(!) with Tsoi. I don't think I need a sequel to Alien: Covenant anymore, as I could imagine things working out much the same way with David left to his own devices on that spaceship! It is also really nice to know that post-Tarkovsky that Russian directors seem to still be infatuated with moments of levitation! Although admittedly its not quite so transcendent in these pieces! (There also seems like a big theme of the empty promise of decadent capitalist conspicuous consumption going on here, with flashy cars featuring prominently even in the depths of space! Though apparently Tsoi has so many dislikes on its video due to the product placement of the Tinkoff.ru bank and according to one comment some sort of vlogger scandal involving it at the time)

And then in 2019 there was the single storyline crossing across two music videos for Biting Elbows: the unreciprocated love of Heartache transforming into collective sci-fi horror Control.

According to imdb Naishuller has a second feature film coming out this year, Nobody, written by the same person who wrote all the John Wick films and starring Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen and...Christopher Lloyd!

And here are a couple of hyper-sexualised Ministry of Sound music videos that kind of try and have their cake and eat it regarding the exploitative gaze on the female body: Satisfaction is probably the funniest of these, though I am not entirely sure that this is a true example of gender equality on display! (I do think there is probably a sly gender-reversed 'builder's bum' joke going on though!)

I See Girls is a remake of a scene from Monty Python's Meaning of Life (very NSFW!), which itself was a repurposed sketch from the very first episode of the TV series. I also quite like Riverside as one of the better onscreen lyric videos with its NSFW sample of Tupac Shakur from Juice (NSFW)

And it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that the video for Call On Me (which is arguably more pornographic than actual pornography!) is most likely influenced by the similarly whiplash-inducing, eye-popping aerobic sequences with Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta from Perfect!

Though the best Ministry of Sound video, for So Good To Me, is almost unbearably wholesome! Though I also like the 'never ending work of a male gigolo' video Look Right Through as well!

Oh my goodness, I have just found out that due to the *ahem* 'popularity' of the Call On Me video, it had a just as NSFW sequel a few years later, to a dance remix of What A Feeling!

Rammstein and one of it's offshoots is in the habit of premiering their videos on actual porn sites, which is a good bit of PR in a time where video premieres don't have the kind of prime-time cache they used to.

After watching the Call On Me video, Youtube's algorithms pointed me to Marie Davidson Work It (Soulwax Remx), for anyone nostalgic for 80s aerobic videos. It definitely inspires me to get up off the couch & go to the gym.

I came across this too late for the list (and for the holidays), but thought I'd mention it here for next time: The video & audio for Happy Xmas (War Is Over) was remastered in 2019 (&Youtube censored it, but it's available again by hitting a warning button). Still hard hitting & relevant decades later.

Of 2019s videos, one of my favorites was Chaka Khan's Like Sugar, very simple dance video & certainly not as high concept or highly choreographed as many these days, but still immensely watchable. Nice to see her make a comeback.

Don't know where else to put this, so I'll include it here, as several of the early Pet Shop Boys' videos previously discussed are in it, the PSB concept film It Couldn't Happen Here (dir. Jack Bond) received a 4k scan & will be coming out on blu-ray & dvd for the 1st time from BFI. I haven't seen it since renting the VHS from a local video store around 30 years ago. Remember it not being completely satisfying (as a film), but enjoying the musical video portions. For some reason I thought it had been done by Derek Jarman....guess not.

Really like that Work It video, though it is a far cry from the days of Lizzie Webb and Mr Motivator! If I'd been making that adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, I would have probably put that in there as the title track!

It seems inevitable in retrospect to have found out that the video for Mr Oizo's Flat Beat was directed by Quentin Dupieux, who went on to that killer tyre film Rubber. (I love one of the comments on the Flat Beat video that "this is probably what Trump does in his office all day"!)

Here's the 2015 sequel Being Flat! And whilst it was not directed by Dupuis here is the next in the Flat Eric universe, the event looping Hand In The Fire (which I like to think is a homage to the 'car tango' sequence in Mission: Impossible II! Either that or the piece that best captures a mid-life crisis with flashy cars and continually losing one's hair whilst seeing a younger version of yourself zooming by happily!)

Mr Oizo is the musical pseudonym of Quentin Dupieux himself (in case you weren't aware).

He's also gone on to far more than just Rubber

I think Le daim has the rare distinction of being a film everyone here's liked so far, too

kuzine wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2020 10:44 pmMr Oizo is the musical pseudonym of Quentin Dupieux himself (in case you weren't aware).

I was not, but it makes sense! And yes, I have to get to Deerskin at some point! It seemed to make more sense to mention Rubber in this context, since it was also about puppeting an object around, unless that is a running theme in his later work too!

Since we briefly went back to the Are Sounds Electrik? channel with that Work It video, I thought I would also highlight the great Yesterday's Tomorrow track which is using footage from the bizarre Val Guest film Toomorrow that seems tailor made for a Flipside release at some point! This was sort of the turning point of Val Guest's career, as after this he went into softcore sex comedy films for a while with Au Pair Girls and Confessions of a Window Cleaner, but Toomorrow was released the same year as Guest's entry into Hammer's prehistoric film series When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth (aka the film with the story treatment by J.G. Ballard!), and Toomorrow itself has an early film role for Olivia Newton-John!

It might just be the way the film is being re-edited to a new music soundtrack but it makes Toomorrow look quite interesting, and maybe an influence on the pop group being kidnapped for their good vibrations in Daft Punk's wonderful Interstella 5555 musical film!

colinr0380 wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2020 10:03 pmWhilst it was not directed by Dupuis here is the next in the Flat Eric universe, the event looping Hand In The Fire (which I like to think is a homage to the 'car tango' sequence in Mission: Impossible II! Either that or the piece that best captures a mid-life crisis with flashy cars and continually losing one's hair whilst seeing a younger version of yourself zooming by happily!)

It was nice to find out from a recent comment on that Hand In The Fire video that it might have been a cut-down to just the overtaking car moments homage to the video for One Out Of Two! They certainly both share that structure of moving from day to night as well.

domino harvey wrote: Tue Sep 24, 2019 9:45 pmSpeaking of Vaporwave, probably worth considering the seminal example, Saint Pepsi Private Caller

Just going back through the thread, I loved Private Caller, and wonder if Moonlit Car Chase by NZCA/Lines would be in the same tradition!

soundchaser wrote: Tue Sep 24, 2019 10:31 pm The MTV Video Music Awards "Video of the Year" Nominees

Winners listed first, all other nominees follow

The 1980s

Any chance we'll get a 90's breakdown?

flyonthewall2983 wrote: Sun Mar 08, 2020 9:00 pmAny chance we'll get a 90's breakdown?

Maybe! I didn’t plan on jumping back in now that the project was over, but if I get some spare time I’ll consider (slowly) putting a post together.

Having just been reminded of it, I should perhaps throw the video for I've Got A Brand New Combine Harvester by The Wurzels into the thread, just in case all the workout videos previously posted were not bawdy enough! (Its a song all about someone wanting to get his hands on a lady's enormous...tracts of land)

The dumb Playboy Party Joke punchline to this video made me laugh a lot more than it should have: Claude VonStroke: Make a Cake (NSFW). And YouTube's algorhythm is on point, because after that this video for Salvatore Ganacci's "Horse" made me laugh even more, and then this one for Valentino Khan's "Lick It" provided a valuable Goofus lesson in these trying CV times

Here's a medical themed music video: I was reminded of the great use of Brassy's B'cos We Rock in Channel 4's 1999 series The Trip, in which the song underscores a piece of film apparently showing the cutting edge technological workings of a Soviet hospital in the 1970s(?). It is on YouTube but unfortunately it gets split into two parts: the track begins here and then continues in this video.

At The Pinocchio Theory, Steven Shaviro is doing his film class online because of the lockdown, and posts Music Video to watch and analyse on his blog

1st post :
THEESatisfaction, Q.U.E.E.N.S. (dream hampton, 2012)
Massive Attack, Splitting the Atom (Edouard Salier, 2009) and Take It There (Hiro Murai, 2016)
Chet Faker, Gold (Hiro Murai, 2014)
Shabazz Palaces, #Cake (Hiro Murai, 2014)
Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes (Kahlil Joseph, 2012)

2nd post :
Kylie Minogue, All the Lovers (Joseph Kahn, 2010)
Boogie, N**** Needs (Gina Gammell and Riley Keough, 2016)
Sophie, Faceshopping (Sophie and Aaron Chan, 2018)
Taylor Swift, Blank Space (Joseph Kahn, 2014)
Anohni, Drone Bomb Me (Nabil Elderkin, 2016)
Brockhampton, Sugar (Kevin Abstract, 2019)
Kesha, My Own Dance (Allie Avital, 2019)

3rd post :
Lady Gaga, Paparazzi (Jonas Åkerlund, 2009); Telephone (Jonas Åkerlund, 2010); Alejandro (Steven Klein, 2010); Born This Way (Nick Knight, 2011)
Lana Del Rey, Video Games (Lana Del Rey, 2011); Born to Die (Yoanne Lemoine, 2011); National Anthem (Anthony Mandler, 2012; Summertime Sadness ((Kyne Newman & Spencer Susser, 2012); Shades of Cool (Jake Nava, 2014); High By the Beach (Jake Nava, 2015); Doin’ Time (Rich Lee, 2019)

4th post :
Rihanna, Umbrella (Chris Applebaum, 2007)
Disturbia (Anthony Mandler,2008)
Rehab (Anthony Mandler, 2008)
Rude Boy (Melina Matsoukas, 2011)
S&M (Melina Matsoukas, 2011)
We Found Love (Melina Matsoukas, 2012)
Bitch Better Have My Money (Rihanna & Megaforce, 2015)
Calvin Harris f. Rihanna, This is What You Came For (Emil Nava, 2016)

5th post :
Kanye West, Runaway (Kanye West, 2010)
Kanye West, Love Lockdown (Simon Henwood, 2008)
Kanye West, Monster (Jake Nava, 2011)
Kanye West, Fade (Eli Linnetz, 2018)
Kanye West, Famous (Eli Linnetz, 2018)