The Highs and Really Lows of New Videos

It’s a tossup for the most irritatingly filmed rock video of the month--Bryan Adams’ featherweight “There Will Never Be Another Tonight” in one corner, U2’s somewhat more inviting “Mysterious Ways” in the other.

The hyper-busy, blurry Adams concert video looks as if it were directed by a toddler blurting out “Camera 5! Camera 2!” at random in the control room. It must be thelegacy of that ghastly car commercial a few years back--you know, the one where the camera whizzed around during the executive meeting, never quite focusing in on who was talking. It’s ersatz cinema verite gone vertiginous with a vengeance.

Though it’s Genesis that sings “I Can’t Dance,” the director of U2’s “Mysterious Ways” seems to have had equally little confidence in Bono’s dancing abilities. How else to explain why the perpetually leaning and swaying singer is consistently shot here in apparent reflection, on a mirror surface shimmied back and forth in a wobbly, seasick sort of motion.

These and other current music videos are reviewed (and rated on a 0-100 scale) in this month’s edition of Sound & Vision.

High Resolution

Digital Underground’s “Kiss You Back.” You expect the risque from this rap troupe--and get it, natch, in this sometimes heatedly sensual black-and-white video. But you also get a delightful travelogue of kisses exchanged between the elderly, children, yuppies, babies, you name it. With these charming visuals, the “Kiss me and I’ll kiss you back” chorus sounds less like the vaguely sexist come-on of the record and more like an irresistible invitation to a universal smooch-fest. As delightful as an unexpected peck. 88

Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Dramatizing a high-school pep rally from hell where the cheerleaders have anarchy symbols on their Lycra tops, this clip inevitably turns into a post-punk teen riot, with Nirvana as the don’t-give-a-darn ringmasters. But before all heck breaks loose, there’s a very funny disquiet to the early, more sedate and spooky shots where the pep squad gals wave their pompons to this unlikely hit’s uneasy rhythm. It’s like the slo-mo prom shots from “Carrie” scored by the Sex Pistols. So is Nirvana spoofing or celebrating this anarchic teen zeal? When you’re the band of the ‘90s, you can have it both ways. 87

The Pixies’ “Head On.” In one of the shortest, simplest clips likely to grace MTV, the Pixies rave through a live version of a Jesus and Mary Chain song with nary a long or establishing shot in sight--just formal close-ups of the four band members’ heads, hands and feet. After a series of individual shots, the video settles into a static, Brady Bunch-style 3x4 grid--heads on top, shoes on bottom. It’s an awfully mathematical way to shoot a rock ‘n’ roll band, but refreshingly true to its title. 85

Standard Grade

Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.” What’s changed since Aerosmith first cut this song in 1974? Well, for one thing, lines like “the rabbit done died” seem almost antiquated when kids are having the ultimate safe sex--phone sex, which happens to be the funny albeit one-joke theme here. If the punch line is predictable, we nonetheless dare you not to laugh at the kicker to this video for Aerosmith’s revived ‘70s chestnut, visualized in a tre s ‘90s way. Young Billy, claiming to be an entertainment lawyer, calls up a phone-sex goddess, visualized as an impossibly fabulous babe pacing her penthouse in a satin miniskirt. Not until the end of the clip do we see Billy’s real surroundings--a typical teen bedroom with Bill and Ted on the wall--as well as the goddess’ true identity. Meanwhile, in the performance part of the video, it’s Dorian Gray time as Aerosmith goes out of its way not to look old enough to be young Billy’s father. Extra points for Steven Tyler’s pool-table somersault. 70

Metallica’s “The Unforgiven.” It’s time for Metallica’s latest exercise in power-nihilism, and we all know what that means . . . an upsurge in Prozac prescriptions. The theme, of course, is a given--life sucks, then you die, usually in that order--yet Metallica has a hundred variations on it, usually framed with grotesque beauty in its rivetingly mordant black-and-white videos. In this one, boys grow into bitter old men, isolated and self-imprisoned in what looks to be the dank hull of a ship. While singer James Hetfield angrily bares his incisors, these elderly actors dig tunnels to nowhere, carve words into the steel walls, wipe their own blood over the inscriptions for good measure and lie down to expire alone. Funny thing is, these post-prog-rockers are probably right: Life is ultimately full of disappointment, decay, denial, damnation, death and taxes. Which doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes wish they’d stop snarling for a minute and go enjoy a cheeseburger. 67

U2’s “Mysterious Ways.” No offense to Bono, who did, after all, help craft one of 1991’s crowning musical achievements, U2’s “Achtung Baby” album, which includes this irresistible single. But frankly, the video could have used more belly dancers and less Bono--or at least less of Bono shot at great length in a wobbly reflecting plate by a director no doubt overly pleased by his own irritating inventiveness. The Arabic setting is imaginatively evoked in the more static shots, but the abundance of gimmicky visual squiggliness makes this virtually unwatchable beyond one viewing. 61

Barbra Streisand’s “Places That Belong to You.” So the consensus on “The Prince of Tides” seems to be that it was fine work--until the overly romanticized last half-hour, when Streisand and Nick Nolte engage in an extended bout of soft-focus adultery (just the thing to get Nolte’s sparkless marriage restarted!). Not surprisingly, that’s the part of the film we get to re-experience in this video for Streisand’s soundtrack-album ballad. However you feel about the movie, as videos-as-trailers go, this isn’t a bad one. And however you feel about Streisand, you have to give her credit for not imposing this song on the film itself, but making it available only on album and video. 52

Genesis’ “I Can’t Dance.” More self-conscious self-deprecation from Phil Collins and crew. Collins is humiliated in a series of unrelated scenes, including a parody of the Bugle Boy desert hitchhiker ads. Connecting these incidents are shots of the three Genesis boys wackily aping ZZ Top’s geeky synchronization. At the end, Collins--who really can dance after all--breaks into an impression of Michael Jackson’s moves in the censored portions of “Black or White,” complete with zippers and panther growls. Cute, sort of, but how many rock videos do we need that exist primarily to gently spoof other rock videos? 50

Video Noise Dropouts

Guns N’ Roses’ “Live and Let Die.” Axl and company should have let this Paul McCartney perennial die. Not only do they not tinker in the slightest with the original arrangement, but during the instrumental break the Gunners even resurrect the strobe lighting that many of us remember so fondly from the Wings Over America tour of our youth. This distinctly unthrilling concert clip uses footage from a variety of GNR concerts. Even though visuals from so many different performances are fairly well synchronized with the soundtrack recording, why not just shoot one concert and give fans the feel of GNR in action? 40

Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch’s “Wildside.” Hey, you didn’t catch us complaining along with all the other cynical naysayers a few years back when Lou Reed sold rights to “Walk on the Wild Side” to an advertising agency. But selling ‘em to Marky Mark is really beneath contempt. Mark uses Reed’s backing track as a backdrop for his own anti-drug and anti-racism tract--sort of a (very) poor man’s version of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” The video has the hapless white rapper and his “posse” strolling through a cemetery as they relate these woeful tales, but the nadir of the clip is the sight of female black mourners in funeral veils mouthing the “doo-do-do-do-doo” chorus originally assigned to Reed’s “colored girls.” Dreadful. 21

Bryan Adams’ “There Will Never Be Another Tonight.” And we’ll never get these four minutes of our lives back, either, Bryan. Adams used to crank out the guilty-pleasure singles like clockwork, but this one doesn’t even have the virtue of a hook, and the concert camera work is positively crazy-making--not as in crazy, man, crazy, but as in insanely miscalculated. 15