Duran Duran – “Is There Something I Should Know” (1983, EMI Capitol)
The members of Duran Duran were immediate video stars, with the back-to-back-to-back success of the Indiana Jones setting of “Hungry Like the Wolf”, the guys in suits being taunted by a siren in the Caribbean of “Rio”, and the X-rated pillow fight/wrestling scene of “Girls on Film”. The fact that these videos were available to be run simultaneously and often in heavy rotation meant that you couldn’t get away from these lads. For all the later acclaim of the band for its body of work, this video is often overlooked. A single from their first album, it was re-released as a new video after they were well on their way to conquering the US.
This video represented a marked departure, showing the band members as matching fashion plates decked out in blue shirts, bobbing among a legion of dudes in the Avengers bowler hats. In addition to being understated, the video features the group seeming to take stock of its quick rise to fame, with band members asking more significant questions about life while their past successes scrolled by in the form of clips of their hit videos. A seeming attempt to redirect Duran Duran down a more substantive path, it would reflect its last moment of innocence before its successive fame resulted in bigger budgets and greater success that ultimately sidetracked the band before it went on hiatus and ultimately returned decades later surprisingly, as one of the most commercially successful retro artists from the 1980s.
Depeche Mode – “But Not Tonight” (1986, Mute)
Depeche Mode‘s path to stardom is markedly different than other bands of its era. Initially regarded as technically sound but limited in range, the synthpop band offered thematic allegories against capitalist greed in “Everything Counts” and “Get the Balance Right”, while producing a series of low budget, straight-ahead videos. Depeche Mode’s cross-over commercial breakthrough came with the anti-war message of “People Are People”, the right backdrop for their added industrial heft. Then, the band made an abrupt turn in 1986 with its darkest album, Black Celebration, a release that instantly transformed the band from industrial technicians into the generational voice for the dispossessed.
The follow-up album, Music for the Masses, was accompanied by a suite of videos with haunting images that would cement the band as the spirit for teen goths worldwide. These high-concept videos, directed by Anton Corbijn, would become the band’s trademark and were integrated into the group’s stage show. “But Not Tonight”, an overlooked video, is a rare upbeat song from this period, featured in the little-known movie Modern Girls, charted the exploits of a group of friends in Los Angeles nightclubs. Like soundtrack videos of its time, the lighthearted video serves as an extended trailer for the film, a breezy, fun affair.
A-ha – “Sun Always Shines on TV” (1986, Warner Bros.)
A-ha achieved iconic status for its breakthrough video, “Take on Me”, with its mixture of comic strip and live-action. Seemingly set up to be a one-hit-wonder, A-ha persevered, with acclaim for songs such as “Blood That Moves the Body” and even scoring a James Bond theme song, the title track to
The Living Daylights. Unfortunately, the success of “Take on Me” outshone the other fine tracks on the Norwegian group’s debut album, including this track. “The Sun Always Shines” starts with the characters from “Take on Me”, and then delves into a sequence that culminates with an army of mannequin musicians, preceding Robert Palmer’s iconic use of mannequin backup singers in “Addicted to Love” and a slew of other singles and soda pop commercials. The video’s anthemic swell conjures up Alphaville’s “Forever Young”, another period video that received a new lease on life as the penultimate song combining a boy, a girl, and a tetherball in Napoleon Dynamite.
U2 – “Desire” (1988, Island)
A companion to the Clash of a band crossing the Atlantic for a bit of Americana would be U2‘s “Desire”, drawn from Rattle and Hum, a commercially disappointing but underrated movie documenting the Irish group’s quest for America, a sprawling Kerouacian odyssey featuring stops in Graceland and Harlem, and sit-ins with B.B. King and a gospel choir. The film seems somewhat staged at points, yes — it seems pretty unseemly to see Bono anointing himself as the chosen one to introduce B.B. King to an American audience. But check out how the video for “Desire”, shot on Hollywood Boulevard, captures the soul of urban America. The Hollywood remix intersperses montage video, including a seminal tragedy in US history, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination on the night of the California primary at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968.
Echo and the Bunnymen – “The Cutter” (1983, Sire)
While many of the other tracks featured here are deeper cuts from bands that achieved mass stardom, this clip by Echo and the Bunnymen represent one of the earliest impressions of these critically acclaimed post-punk artists who, despite an avid fan base, never ascended the heights of U2, the Cure, or the Police. While Echo and the Bunnymen are better known for “The Killing Moon” (the song Ian McCulloch loves to refer to as the “most beautiful song ever written”), the video that makes a greater impression is “The Cutter”, part of the very stark suite of videos shot for Porcupine on location in Iceland. The video shows band members traipsing around on the ice in a manner that captures the frigid feel of the music.
Time Zone – “World Destruction” (1984, Virgin)
One of the earliest rap videos — and one that never saw the light of mainstream or cable TV — was “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash, which remains as timeless a classic today as when it wasn’t aired back in the day, documenting the litany of woes associated with survival in the city. Against the backdrop of social protest and growing angst in the mid-1980s, as the blight across urban America seemed at odds with the “Morning in America” visuals of the Reagan re-election in 1984, was this apocalyptic collaboration between displaced punk rocker Johnny Lydon and electro pioneer Afrika Bambaataa.
In the midst of the conflict over the ability of black artists to gain access to equal time, this collaboration, laid down in half a day, is offering a damning indictment of the fraying of world order (with vocal snippets from US Presidents Nixon and Reagan). Preceding the pop collaboration of Run-DMC and Aerosmith on “Walk This Way”, it would be mirrored in a series of metal-rap mashups that showed the affinity of the two genres, including most famously, Public Enemy and Anthrax on “Bring the Noise”.
Grandmaster Caz/Chris Stein – “South Bronx Subway Rap” (1983, Rhino)
Old-school rap clips are notoriously hard to find. This video is even harder, as it is a compilation clip of scenes from the movie Wild Style, which at its center featured an emcee battle between Cold Crush Brothers and the Grand Wizard Theodore and the Fantastic Five, two collectives that in real life engaged in a spirited rivalry. The Fantastic Five consisted of Theodore Livingston, aka Grand Wizard Theodore, who legend had it invented scratching by accident when he was playing records in his room. When his mom banged on his door to tell him it was too loud, he accidentally moved the record back and forth. The Cold Crush Brothers were pioneers on a number of fronts.
Their second single, “Punk Rock Rap”, was one of the first indie/major label collaborations, and the first rap-rock hybrid. They engineered the first successful foreign hip-hop tours in Tokyo, Japan, in 1983. Wild Style — directed by Charlie Ahearn and featuring contributions from an all-star lineup of hip-hop artists, including Grandmaster Flash and Fab 5 Freddy, the work of graffiti artist Dondi, and the work of Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, a producer — is viewed as the first hip hop movie; it enjoyed legendary status much later, but given limited on-air outlets for hip-hop, was primarily a cult movie.
The video features scenes of the South Bronx, emceed by Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers (who many believe was responsible for much of the lyrics to Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”). Also, it includes an extended mix that features a series of stills from the movie.
Front242 – “Quite Unusual” (1986, Wax Trax)
While industrial music, house, and techno were among the movements that emerged from the underground dance clubs, the genres were relatively underrepresented in 1980s music television. Back then, dance clubs often featured a bank of TV monitors to broadcast the latest New Wave/alternative videos. While KMFDM and Nine Inch Nails were prodigious in their video output, and Ministry issued a memorable clip for “Over the Shoulder”, which coupled teens on a hijink with images of caged chickens, Front 242 gets the nod here, for “Quite Unusual”.
The clip has all you need or expect from an industrial video. Abandoned warehouse, check. Desolate figure shuffling in the shadows to the tyranny of the beat, check. Sinister Bond villain/mad scientist is at work on some sinister plot, so check. Bonus points for the toy helicopter cam, with footage depicting said toy helicopter circling (as if to show off how clever the director was in pulling off this simple, lo-fi effect), along with the gratuitous use of a trampoline. Spoiler alert to those freaked out by seeing our heroes chained in captivity: they escape to freedom in a helicopter.
Pat Benatar – “We Belong” (1983, Chrysalis)
Music video was a vehicle that offered medium ingénues the opportunity for melodrama that bordered on camp. Pat Benatar, one of the most prodigious video artists of female rockers, was particularly effective in using the videos to showcase the appeal of her independent spirit, whether through “Heartbreaker”, “You Better Run”, “Shadows of the Night”, or the theatrical opus “Love Is a Battlefield”. But one of her more understated and underrated videos was the clip to “We Belong”, off the sixth album, which takes off as an anthem. Unsurprisingly, it would be plucked as the track that highlighted the film Talladega Nights.
David Bowie – “Absolute Beginners” (1989, Virgin)
The end of the 1980s saw the blurring of film and video, as lavish title track videos from popular movies served as extended trailers for the films. At the same time, directors who got their start in music videos would make the jump to motion pictures. Yet, one of the most unsung and sweeping videos was the work of British film director Julien Temple, who directed the 1950s period piece Absolute Beginners, based on the novel, a coming-of-age story set amidst the backdrop of racial tensions in England.
The video for the title track, the type of sweeping music video that spared you the price of admission by summarizing the whole movie in six minutes, has David Bowie navigating the viewer through the twists and turns of the story’s plot. While the film was a commercial failure, it achieved recognition for its sprawling soundtrack. It was an all-star sampling of British artists, including Bowie, the Style Council, Sade, Ray Davies, and Jerry Dammers of the Specials.
This article was originally published on 1 September 2011.