WANNA ‘PARTY’? NO THANKS, EDDIE
Eddie Murphy has been a hit in every media circle he’s entered, including TV, the movies and most recently the pop charts, but now the young comic can take home a booby prize too--he’s the winner, by landslide proportions, of Pop Eye’s second Video Bottom 10 Readers Poll.
His “Party All the Time” video (which features Murphy singing in a studio full of awed fans and friends) got 16% of nearly 70 total readers’ ballots, easily outdistancing runners-up the Starship and the Power Station (the latter band got the most votes of all, but they were split between two songs, “Some Like It Hot” and “Bang a Gong (Get It On).”
In fairness to Bottom 10 winners, virtually all of the top vote-getters were so widely aired, especially on MTV, that they may have scored high simply because fans grew sick of seeing their visual cliches repeated ad nauseam. The winners also included a healthy sampling of overdressed video pretty-boys, led by the Power Station posers, Arcadia (featuring the still-chubby Simon Le Bon), David Lee Roth and aging sex-objects Mick Jagger and David Bowie.
Many voters also lambasted videos culled from Hollywood movies, which have become little more than glitzy advertisements used to hype new films (John Paar’s “Man in Motion (St. Elmo’s Fire)”) and Phil Collins’ “Separate Lives” were big vote-getters in this category). As one disgusted reader, Chris Courtois of Redondo Beach, put it: “Thank God there wasn’t a hit song featured in ‘Rambo.’ I can just see it: ‘I-I-I-I Ain’t Gonna Play Ho Chi Minh City’ by Artists United Against Big Bad Commies, consisting of Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Sammy Hagar and Wally George.”
Narrowly missing the Bottom 10, but getting enough votes to merit honorable mention, were such artists as Godley & Creme, Katrina & the Waves, Loverboy, Yoko Ono, Heart, Tears for Fears, Glenn Frey and Lou Reed for his Honda commercial. See the box below for the winners, with comments from some very bleary-eyed MTV addicts.
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