Lack of Flashback!

[tahnan]

The nice thing about sitting in an apartment with no companions but cats and no furniture but an air mattress is that I have plenty of time to catch up on my 80s videos. Fortunately, mtvmusic.com is helping (it's fascinating, isn't it? Suddenly even reality-show channels like MTV think they can somehow get into the music business). So just for the hell of it, I'll point you to four videos for which I feel no nostalgia at all, as I never saw them in the 80s, or 90s, or whenever they might have aired on a music television channel, when such things existed.

Given that many people my age can still do the "same as it ever was" dance that David Byrne introduced us to, it's hard to believe that this dance never caught on. (If I liked their music as much as I like this video, I wouldn't make people turn it off all the time.)

I didn't know this song until well after it came out, and it's pretty mournful anyway, but the video turns it into an incredibly sad funeral dirge. (Also from the artist, the worst hospital, medically speaking, in any video since the St. Elsewhere doctors moonlighted in "Good Loving".)

Almost everything The Eurythmics recorded was weird and moody, and their videos matched. I mean, pretty much every Eurythmics video was creepy: Annie Lennox as a kind of dominatrix CEO who ends up in a field with cello players and cows; Annie Lennox stalking the moors in a cloak; Annie Lennox as some sort of robotic...you know, I don't even know what the "Missionary Man" video was about. Anyway, it's all creepy and strange and possibly avant-garde, except for their one unmitigatedly boppy song, in which the only creepy thing is the leopard Annie Lennox is wearing. (I suspect that Dave Thomas Stewart was probably pretty creepy in his own right, when he wanted to be, but being creepy near Annie Lennox is like trying to be tall near Yao Ming.)

And finally, a version of a song I didn't even know existed, because in America it was the Go-Go's version that got airplay. But apparently it was cowritten by a Go-Go and a Fun Boy, and overseas it was the version by the Fun Boy and his two companions that everyone knows. It's not really a cover, because it's his song too, but it's definitely different.

Anyway, enjoy. Tell Drew Barrymore and her mascara ad that I said hi.

Comments

[jeffurrynpl.livejournal.com]

My suitemate in college used to play Fun Boy 3's Our Lips Are Sealed all the time. It never got old and I loved it and still do!

[selinker.livejournal.com]

Dave Stewart. Dave Thomas was the one standing next to Rick Moranis, or any number of cows with short life expectancies.

Bizarrely, you have chosen my favorite songs by three of these four artists. But in the case of Fun Boy Three, the clearly superior song is "The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum".

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Darnit, I was sitting here thinking "There's Dave Thomas the Wendy's guy but then there's a different Dave Thomas and I think this is him" except that, no, this is the David A. Stewart who shouldn't be confused with the other British Dave Stewart musician. I'm not at my most clear-headed these days.

Interesting that they're your favorite songs by those artists; they're more or less mine too. Ish. At least, I can't stand anything by TMBG except that song (and "Istanbul", which of course isn't really even quite theirs). "Right By Your Side" is my favorite forgotten Eurythmics song that people seem to have forgotten, insofar as it was inexplicably left off the American version of their Greatest Hits album (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Hits_(Eurythmics_album)). And I do love it, though the mournful alto of "Here Comes the Rain Again" always moves me. For the Crash Test Dummies, it's probably a tossup between that and Afternoons and Coffeespoons, though perhaps what I really like is the overall flow of "G-d Shuffled His Feet".

"Our Lips Are Sealed" is definitely my favorite Go-Go's song, but as for Fun Boy Three, I have no favorite song, since I had never heard of them until I acquired "It Ain't What You Do" on some random best-of-80s CD, possibly a British one insofar as it also included British new wave bands I'd never heard of like Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Haysi Fantayzee.

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

At least two of my favorites as well, though Birdhouse and Superman's Song are hardly surprises. The latter, and Paul Simon's Call Me Al are two songs which I very clearly remember the first time I heard them, and my "Holy crap! Where did that come from? Pops songs don't sound like that!" reaction.

Speaking of awesome, early MTV, forgotten, and creepy....

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

So if Uncle Fester and Riff-Raff had a love child and dressed him in the unholy spawn of a kimono and a monk's robes...well, why not hire him to sing for a costume ball.

That's certainly creepy. I think I prefer my slick, well-produced Eurythmics creepiness. The really weird thing about that one is that Eurythmics songs often have a sort of underlying menace to them, whereas this song was basically just upbeat. With a creepy video.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

When I was at CTY, this RA named Galen White "choreographed" a dance to "Birdhouse" that became all the rage. As I recall through the haze of many years, it was suspiciously similar to "The Electric Slide."

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

I hate you. Do you know how much time I can waste doing this?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

As it so happens, yes, I do.

sigue sigue sputnik fan?

[andrew-madinc.livejournal.com]

sigue sigue sputnik fan? Flaunt it (elektronik) 2010 usa tour dates so far:

May 20, 2010 Austin, Tx
Eyslium

May 23, 2010 Seattle, Wa
El Corazon

May 26, 2010 San Francisco,Ca
Red Devil Lounge

May 27, 2010 Chicago, IL
REGGIES ROCK CLUB

May 30, 2010 Dallas, Tx
Trees