Summer Videos Aimed at the Libido
Sex knows no season, of course, when it comes to pop music videos. But the summer seems to have inspired an especially saucy new round of libidinal rock clips, representing everyone from veteran pander-bears Prince and George Michael to fresh hunks Color Me Badd. If you’re suffering end-of-the-week “Melrose Place” withdrawals and need an extra pick-me-up of shallow narcissism to carry your bad self to Wednesday, turn on your MTV and check out the hot-to-trot videos surveyed in the first half of this month’s Sound & Vision roundup. (Videos are rated on a 0-100 scale.)
They Want Your Sex
George Michael’s “Too Funky.” Forget the comparatively sexless Right Said Fred; here’s a man who’s just too sexy for his own videos these days. As with his “Freedom ‘90” clip, Michael populates this one with supermodels, including the ubiquitous Linda Evangelista and several other gals in a Paris-runway battle of the babes. (Our personal fashion fave on view here: the rather clunky-looking breastplate with handlebars and rear-view mirrors attached, no doubt coming soon to a Neiman Marcus near you.)
But despite his celebrated anti-stardom stance, the faux -elusive Michael can’t help but include a few oh-so-coy cameos of himself cranking a movie camera in the shadows. And a credit plate at the end with a question mark strongly suggests that our boy George has directed the thing. Take this as a warning that creeping auteur -itis can strike even the rhythmically developed. 45
Color Me Badd’s “Slow Motion.” Now here’s something you don’t often see anymore in the age of sexual harassment suits in the record business, Supreme Court confirmation controversies and Navy scandals: A four-star salute to the casting couch! Va-va- voom! In this scenario, a succession of four models shows up at Color Me Badd headquarters, where each is photographed and singled out for caressing by individual members of this randy little barbershop quartet. And what a cogent reminder it is that, political correctness aside, starlet auditioning is not a dead art.
Once paired up, the Badd boys then fire up the VCRs to relive their trysts with their ladyfriends from the agency--hence the title, which refers less to foreplay than re play. The message: They like to seduce, but even more, they like to watch . Which doesn’t mean we have to. 15
Eric B. & Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique.” We’ll withhold comment on the title advice and let these two rappers duke it out someday with author Naura (“How to Satisfy a Woman . . .”) Hayden. But this embarrassing clip, in which the guys wax terribly serious while surrounded by allegedly adoring bikini-clad girls, is really only comparable to one other video on the air: those campy late-night half-hour commercials for real-estate get-rich kingpin Tom Wu, who likewise doth protest too much when it comes to overstocking his self-promotion with worshipful bimbos in string nothings. If there’s a special hell for media lotharios, it probably involves sharing a Jacuzzi with Hef, Wu and Rakim--and paid entourages. 15
Def Leppard’s “Make Love Like a Man.” Have to admit we were looking forward to this one, figuring from the title, at least, that the Def jammers were sidestepping their usual dull-rockin’ machismo to indulge in some uncharacteristic sexual cross-role-playing. No such luck; as it turns out, the title phrase is not exclaimed in the imperative sense, but rather serves as a simple summation of their own preferred bedroom technique. The usual performance footage is mixed up with big-screen rear-projection of romantic clips from public-domain silent movies, plus helpful, gigantic printouts of the lyrics, all guaranteed to make Cole Porter’s remains green with envy: “Make love like a man / I’m a man / That’s what I am / Huh! “ (Or is that Duh? ) 15
Prince’s “Sexy MF.” In this abominably misogynist nine-minute video, Prince doesn’t bother to abbreviate the title. Needless to add, you won’t be finding its profane choruses on MTV; instead, it’s being made available for sale on home video. The scene is set when Prince and two members of his “gangster-glam” posse pull up to a rival’s private card party in their luxury sports cars and order the three sexiest women there to drive off with them: “U, u and u--get in the car.”
Against a James Brown-style groove, the Machiavellian One then unveils a rich man’s erotic fantasy, a menage a trois in which he promises to somehow engage “not your body, your mind, you fool”; never mind that he has yet to hear these lingerie-laden conquests speak a word. It gets worse, especially when Prince--who has sunk well beneath self-parody here--does just what you’d expect with a phallic, gun-shaped microphone, as if he’d just discovered this party trick yesterday. Needless to say, he gets the girls, in a denouement bound to appeal to any sentimentalist whose idea of the perfect “meet-cute” is a kidnaping. 0
The Rest
Madonna’s “This Used to Be My Playground.” Hold on, you say; doesn’t Madonna belong in the previous, saucy section? Not this (merry-)go-round. “Playground,” the Sentimental Girl’s closing ballad from “A League of Their Own,” seems, in fact, almost shamefully treacly for someone with such a smart mouth on her, stocked as it is for five-minutes-plus with a series of earnest lyrical cliches that climaxes with this epiphany: “The best things in life are freeeee.” If the single itself is a snoozer, though, the accompanying video is a clever class act. An unseen man, presumably an ex-lover, pages forward and backward through a scrapbook of somber Madonna pix, all of which come to life through nicely achieved visual effects to sing this nostalgic lament. 65
Indigo Girls’ “Galileo.” The neo-folkie duo tries to have some fun with its serious image in this light-hearted exploration of reincarnation, with mixed results. Against a rather earnest lyric about “how many lives” it’ll take to nail down nirvana, the screen is alight with pithy printed recollections of the pair’s possible past incarnations--which include priests, Popes, insects and even watermelons. (“Water retention is nothing new to me” is definitely the goofiest gag here.) Meanwhile, the Indigos occasionally break from their shag haircuts to dress--and cross-dress--up as Vikings and pontiffs and the like. Too precious, even in its self-deprecating humor, but still more interesting than just about any other clip on the air right now. 65
The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love.” The giddy exception to the otherwise sour navel-gazing on the Cure’s latest album, “Friday I’m in Love”--a single very much in the tradition of the Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind”--gets an equally light-headed video clip. Amid a virtual circus of exuberant and wildly costumed intruders, the band goes goofily romantic in front of a backdrop that changes as rapidly as the weekday moods Robert Smith describes in the lyric. A nifty lark. 65
XTC’s “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead.” Remember those weird charts that used to make coincidental parallels between the assassinations of presidents Lincoln and Kennedy? XTC does much the same cheesy thing with its tale of Peter Pumpkinhead, an amalgam of Kennedy and . . . Christ. Oliver Stone would be proud of the messianic colors with which Andy Partridge paints the Camelot man.
But despite a certain cleverness in some of the visual puns (“Cross + Sight”), it comes off rather tastelessly--perhaps even more so toward JFK than J.C. Do we really need to see another superfluous re-creation of Jacqueline K. climbing out onto the rear of the convertible, or to see another cooing Marilyn Monroe look-alike, let alone one dubbed “Marilyn Magdalene”? 55
Michael Jackson’s “Jam.” It’s two Michael J.’s for the price of one: Jackson teaches Jordan to moonwalk (or tries, anyway), and Jordan teaches Jackson to shoot hoops. Not bad, if not particularly amusing. Meanwhile, Heavy D. re-creates his celebrate-Michael rap and, less usefully, those Kris Kross kids show up as the token tykes in a Michael Jackson video. 50
U2’s “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Is U2 really going to stretch out its “Zoo TV” satire of television and rock-star imagery over this entire year? It’s getting a little old already, and the band hasn’t even come back to the Coliseum with its spoof/revue yet. For anyone who missed the first leg of the tour, the band zaps through a multitude of international channels here for our ironic enrichment. The “performance” footage of the group is more interesting, shot with cameras zooming in circles around the stationary band members. 50
One Last Note
For new levels in inadvertent tastelessness, you’d be hard-pressed to beat MTV’s recurrent airing of an old Firehouse video, “Don’t Treat Me Bad,” which depicts the band performing on a desolate downtown L.A. street surrounded by burning cars, with an apparently abandoned fire engine parked at the end of the block. This was filmed well prior to the riots, of course, but dig this coincidence: All the storefronts in this holocaust-like scenario are markedly Korean , including the sewing-machine shop that explodes near the end. Watching this rerun air, in the light of recent events, you might have to smile at the awful irony, but nonetheless wonder: Is someone not minding the store?