What about Bad Rock Videos

[clockworkcanary]

I know this may not be the place to talk about this but since I love this message board/site and none of the b-flick sites mention it, I thought it might be fun to talk about all the b-grade rock videos we remember from early MTV days (and maybe some recent...if they even play videos anymore).

Anyway, I got thinking about this after I pulled out some old VHS tapes from way-back when I used to tape afternoon videos, the Headbanger's Ball, and some videos from the early 90s -oh my did I have a few laughs.  I actually forgot how bad some of those videos were.  The best has to be from the first 4 years of MTV, when it seemed like they just put whatever in any video whether it made sense or not.

I'd love to give each of these another view, do write-ups, and get some screenshots, but that's another project for another day.

For starters, some examples from headbanger's ball:

Dokken: Dream Warriors
-Look out Freddy! beware of those bust-outta-the-wall guitar solos

Ratt: Round and Round
-gotta love those bust-through-the-ceiling and fall on the dinner table solos

Motley Crue: Looks that Kill
-gotta love a drumset that shoots pentagrams at road-warrior chicks

Twisted Sister: I Wanna Rock (or any Twisted Sister video)
-brings back memories of synchronized locker headbanging haha "whatta you wanna do with your life?"

Ozzy: The Ultimate Sin
Ozzy as JR (with thick eye-liner) from Dallas? lol funny stuff

Ratt: Way Cool Jr.,
Ok just the title is bad enough but the premise of the song...?  If I had the powers of this "Way Cool Jr." fellow, first thing I would do is change my name to something less tard.

Poison: I want action
-ok these guys aren't even trying to "fake" play - what a stage set up too

Nuclear Assault: Critical Mass
Ok let's make an environmentally-aware video in a windy oilfield so my hair blows over my face constantly while I try to sing while Jessica Hawn (sp?) flounders in a lawn chair for no apparent reason.  I do like the one-eyed smiley face though

...and there's tons more - I'll have to watch a few more tapes - one of those times I'm glad I didn't tape over stuff.

[Vermin Boy]

Not really a video, but I'd include Gary Numan's performance from Urgh! A Music War (a truly excellent 80s punk/new wave performance compilation film). Throughout the entire song, Gary is tooling around the stage in a "futuristic" go-kart, and looking extremely unhappy about it. Oh, and the song he's singing ISN'T "In Cars." Priceless.

[clockworkcanary]

Wow I love Gary Numan's work -didn't know he was in any movies.  I hear that Devo had their own indie film in the mid-70s way before "whip it" days but I've never seen it -Devolution or something like that.

[Zapranoth]

The Cramps give a truly unappealing performance during that one.  I've been so disappointed that no one put "Urgh" on DVD. :(

Klaus Nomi puts in a supremely odd appearance in that one..  and then there's that Pere Ubu performance  (somebody shoot him, please)...

but my favorite part was my brothers' exchange when watching Numan sing "Down in the Park."  It went like this:

Virgil:  "He doesn't get out of that thing for the whole song, does he."

Shane, grinning:  "Nope."

[AndyC]

Early videos were the only ones that were any good. Some of them were very creative. They told stories. A lot of them actually tried to fit their imagery with the song. Most importantly, they were fun.

Somewhere along the line, the budgets got bigger, and videos went from being secondary to being almost as important as the songs. They got pretentious and artsy and they all started looking alike. I haven't enjoyed music videos since about 1990.

Those cheesy early videos, to me, are what music videos should be.

[odinn7]

I completely agree with AndyC on this one. I haven't really watched videos since the real early 90's. If there were any groups that I wanted to see videos of, I would just buy them on VHS. Videos were cheesy and I could rattle off a huge list of all the ones that I thought were stupid but when I look at them now, I really enjoy them for the memories. Videos were supposed to be cheesy and it went down hill when someone decided they wanted to make them into a work of art. Give me "Free Wheel Burning" by Priest, "TV Dinners" by ZZ Top, or even anything by Cyndi Lauper (who I hated at the time) over almost anything today. The fun is gone from videos.

[Master Blaster]

I think he just kinda looks like that. I thought that was cool though. It looked like one of those old sit in 80's video games. Maybe he had a game of Galaga or something going in there. Numan was a total rockstar there for awhile then completely dropped off the map. He's still out there though, but I'm not a big fan of the music he's done since the early 80's. He plays guitar now, wears alot of black and sings about death and crap now. Pffft, we already have a million of those.

[clockworkcanary]

Heh yeah I hated Cindy Lauper at the time too but all the sudden I found myself downloading her music.   I also used to dispise the Eurythmics but now I find myself longing for "Here comes the rain again" bah how things change over time.

But yeah that's the great thing about early 80s videos - they had very low budgets and they had a tremendous amount of creative freedom (before the record companies realized what was happening) -but there were some really really bad (in a good way) videos back then.  Does anyone else in the world besides me and my cousin remember the band (and song) called "Dog Police"?  Now that's funny stuff.  I loved that back in those days, they would play something experimental (good or not) and now they're afraid to take any chances.  Empty-V it should be called nowadays.

TV Dinners oh my I had forgotten about that one!  Remember Smuggler's Blues?  or "Love is a Battlefield" haha.  I remember watching MTV all day just for the chance to see a Quiet Riot video or Def Leppard's "f-f-f-foolin" ha!

[Menard]

I do miss the music videos from the early 80s when they were largely experimental. I cannot remenber the name of the performer, but I remember a song called backstabber sung largely in a shower. It was a time when a lot of upstart bands got an opportunity for exposure where they were not being given that chance on Top 40 radio stations. Now you apparently have to have a million dollar budget just to get on MTV during one of the few times they play music videos.

How about an MTV or VH1 retro channel where they just play music videos all day like they use to.

Oh, and another bad video inductee. Does anybody recall Devo's Peek-a-Boo video?

[odinn7]

VH1 Classic does play mostly videos all day and they're the videos that most of us probably remember. The unfortunate thing is that I witnessed the beginning of the end for them too in that I saw them advertising a tv show they were going to run. This is how MTV went to crap. They started with a game show (what the hell was the name of that show anyway?) and then it became 2 and then reality shows and so on.

[Fearless Freep]

He he...."Dog Police" was a Basement Tapes winner...I remember that one.

I also remember a few by Thomas Dolby and "Leave It" by Yes trying to push the boundary of what could be done with video editing

[SaintMort]

TAKE ON ME!

[Yaddo 42]

Ashamed to say I barely remember Dog Police. But I'd take any Adam Ant video from his heyday over the boated miniepics and ego trips that have come along over the years; they were usually funny, told a story or had something to do with the song, threw in some hot women, and were mostly shot on videotape.  

Patton Oswald did a standup bit about all the heavy metal video cliches, and how he realized all metal fans(including him) were gay. To sum up the bit he notice that they all seemed to take place in factories that only made sparks all day long, and there were hot babes in most of them but they were miles away from the band and the guys in the band didn't try to find them. You'd have to see it, but it was pretty funny.

Yes, there were lots of bad videos, but some of them could be quite funny. Many like the Utopia song "Please Don't Let Me Down" played up their cheapness. The video consisted of the members of the group dressed as multicolored centipedes kicking each other in the rear as the camera side scrolled from one bug to the next.

I vaguely remember a Edgar Winter video for "Frankenstein '83" with Edgar as the mad scientist, that looked like it was a home movie it was so cheap and badly shot.

Any Sam Kinson music video was pretty corny since he would just get his rocker buddies together with some groupie/model types and goof around on camera. I'm sure the wrap parties were legendary, they should have filmed those.

VH-1 or MTV did one of those "Awesomely Bad Videos" shows once where they showed clips from a Sisquo (sp?) video with him fighting a CGI dragon in the city that was apparently so laughable, his record company decided to film another one more down to earth and conventional since they thought it was awful enough to possibly ruin his career. And it cost $4 million dollars.

[AndyC]

SaintMort wrote:
> TAKE ON ME!

One of the all-time best. The combination of live action and animated sketches (rotoscoped?) is hard to beat.

That's what I love about those early videos, so much creativity and variety.

[AndyC]

I remember back when Much Music (Canadian eqivalent of MTV) had an annual cheesiest videos of the year show, usually around New Years.  Fromage '90 (or whatever year) was hilarious. You'd get this weird mix of raunchy metal videos, covers of songs in completely incompatible styles, outright goofy stuff (Ray Stevens anyone?) and so forth. One of the last things worth watching on Much Music before videos lost their fun and, as with MTV, stopped being the focus of the channel. Much was much better in the early years, when they just had hosts in a studio introducing video after video.

That's not quite right. Much had one good thing in the late 90s. They used to do 80s weekends - two or three straight days of classic videos. I stumbled across one of those a few years back. Watched more Much in one weekend than I had in the previous five or six years. Pretty much sat there in my bathrobe day and night, eating frozen food and basking in nostalgia. Ah, bachelorhood, when a guy could get away with being a bum on the weekend.



Post Edited (08-01-05 07:56)