POP MUSIC : Delia’s Gone, But Man in Black’s Back

You can bet on it: In our lifetime, there will be but one man who gets his music video rejected by MTV because of violence and purported bad taste and can lay claim to being a regularly featured speaker at Billy Graham crusades. Ladies and gentlemen: Johnny Cash.

The Man in Black goes really noir with “Delia’s Gone,” the first video promoting his new Rick Rubin-produced acoustic folk-country album. Cover girl Kate Moss co-stars as Delia, who gets real, real gone, as in dead, and we all know you can’t get much more waif-ish than that.

Moss starts off the video deceased, and it only gets worse for her from there, as we even see Cash shoveling dirt into an open grave, where it lands on her fresh, white-clad corpse.

Unless we’re seeing the video on MTV. Its standards and practices department had a problem with that dirt-shoveling shot, so the re-edit that was subsequently accepted by the network substitutes an actionless shot of the dearly departed Moss with some soil already atop her. The fine line of luridness between seeing the dirt falling and the dirt having already fallen escapes us, but it’s no biggie.

“Delia’s Gone” is the top clip assessed in this month’s Sound & Vision, where currently airing music videos are reviewed and rated on a 0-100 scale. Also on view this time is another video starring a super-model, John Mellencamp’s “Wild Night,” which does not require leading lady Cindy Crawford to play dead.

Johnny Cash, “Delia’s Gone.” So whom did Cash meet on all those trips to Folsom Prison? Henry (as in “Portrait of a Serial Killer”)? He looks uncharacteristically frightening, coming at the camera with a piece of rope, re-creating the way his murder ballad’s doomed narrator went after his cheatin’ fiancee, tying her to a chair before unloading two shells into her. Can you say gangsta-country ?

This could have turned out undeniably tacky--like that recent Tom Petty video that had him foolishly messing about with a corpse played by Kim Basinger. But there’s no cheek here. Director Anton Corbijn has burnished this brief (2:18), black-and-white video with the haunting look of a real American Gothic, alternating a graveyard windstorm with the sepia stillness of the murder scene. 80

John Mellencamp with Me’Shell Ndege-Ocello, “Wild Night.” Who better to track the comings and goings of a long “Wild Night” than a taxi driver who sees and hears all? And who better to portray the gritty life that would likely be a cabbie’s than . . . Cindy Crawford? Yet here she is, sexily piloting her own Yellow Cab around L.A. after hours, the anti-Bickle, hoping--we can only figure--that someday a Noxema rain will come and wash the scum off these streets.

Mellencamp and NdegeOcello’s reasonable (if superfluous) duet of the Van Morrison chestnut just can’t compete with the sight of America’s foremost uber model cheerfully chauffeuring scads of fares around the central city, waving and laughing and hanging out at that Hollywood Boulevard chicken shack, looking fetching as ever in a white T and never getting held up. First Sandra Bullock, now Crawford, at the helm of various forms of L.A. public transportation . . . What’s up? Nice try, you sneaky city planners, but we’re still not giving up our cars . 55

Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories, “Stay (I Missed You).” What a great way to do a music video: One single tracking shot around an apartment, following a confessional singer-songwriter who boldly confronts the camera with all the verve and vulnerability she can muster for the full length of the song, sans camera tricks, edits or interruptions of any sort. Just great, we repeat . . . except we don’t buy a second of it.

Loeb’s stream of consciousness, directed at an errant lover, is precious enough on its own, without the added sight of her wringing her hands and emoting directly into the camera lens with a little more familiarity than you’d hope for from a freshman artist. Never mind the feminine-yet-hip all-black duds, the unfurnished-but-hip New York apartment, the grandma-ish-yet-hip eyeglasses that might be freshly ripped off MTV veejay Kennedy’s face.

Actor Ethan Hawke--who pushed Loeb, his still-unsigned NYC neighbor, onto the “Reality Bites” soundtrack, from which this surprise Top 10 hit sprang--also directed the video. His first instinct, to have her go for in-your-face “honesty,” may have been good, but if Hawke ever overacted on screen the way he’s encouraged his charge to here he might never get another job. Intimacy with the camera hasn’t seemed quite this scary in a video since Sinead O’Connor shed that famous tear a few years back. 55

Frente, “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Egad! It’s more of that dreaded intimacy. New Order’s new-wave standard gets the unplugged treatment from this freshman combo, and it’s almost to be pulled off, but the song--strong as it was--begins to sound just the slightest bit, well, silly removed from the impassively electro band treatment and treated anew as tender, forthright folk ballad.

And no one with the slightly nasal--if pretty--adolescent-sounding voice that Angie Hart sings in does herself that many favors by shooting a video that consists pretty much entirely of a close-up of her face, at least not with the nose ring so very dominating the frame. 53

Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Doggy Dogg World.” We just can’t kill the beast--’70s fever, that is: Smiley faces are back. Union 76 is suddenly promoting those orange Styrofoam antenna balls again. And Snoop’s latest video is populated not just with his burgeoning Afro but a retro roomful of extras’ follicular wide loads. Truly, everything round is new again.

The funk-generation nostalgia extends here to Tempts-like male vocal groups seen backing Dogg’s typically laconic rap, and “Super-fly”-style duds for wardrobe. Curious that Snoop’s glorified vision of a “Doggy Dogg World” would hark back so unabashedly to the Scooby Doo epoch. 53

Meat Loaf, “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are.” And songs on the latest Meat Loaf album may appear lon ger than they are. Here we have another of songwriter Jim Steinman’s hyper-nostalgic reveries from “Bat Out of Hell II,” done up dirge style this time. In successive verses, Mr. Loaf recalls the childhood buddy he lost in a crash, and the babe he lost his innocence to in a back seat. (No one ever uses a bed in a Steinman song when there’s a Coupe de Ville around, or dies of natural causes when motorized hara-kiri’s an alternative.)

Both these unrelated boomer reminiscences are rendered on film as literally as possible: the little friend’s small plane nose dive, with Robert Patrick (“T2”) looking on as dismayed dad; the narrator’s small convertible tryst with a hilariously anachronistic but bodacious model. Watching this beautiful hooey, you, too, might get nostalgic--for Loaf’s first, infinitely superior, video-less “Bat Out of Hell” album. But, as Steinman would say, that was long ago and it was far away, and it was so much better than it is today. 47