Paula Abdul. Are you laughing and/or being totally disgusted by vivid thoughts of STDs and or alcohol clinics? Well look, full disclosure I am JUST old enough to remember her like she is in the video for "Straight Up" which god knows when it came out but it was well before Simon Cowell squeezed himself into an ill-fitting spandex-enhanced black t-shirt or in fact, was important at all. Yeah, you see where I stand on that "feud." The point is Our Lady Paula had talent once, and maybe even SWERVE.
In only the most whitebread way possible. Check out the video and watch carefully for the rough edges cunningly applied by the stodgy by this bitches-and-Dom time for hip-hop videos, that is to say, laugh your ass off at the "grafitti" but also, watch PA's fucking MOVES in those tap shoes:
So? Yeah, you started bopping and dancing, just like I did when I saw this like twenty minutes ago and realized it needed to be at the top of my very long and very overdue queue. You know why? Because late-80s/early-90s Paula is the same as early-90s Janet, and their fall from apple cheeked sexpots into nymphomaniac pariahs should be studied carefully, with tweezers.
Though honestly I think Janet came out better in the deal. Paula croons helplessly here if we love her, if we love her studiously prepared moods, her swinging arms, her big eyes and fake come-ons, and I guess you can see now, that the world whirled around and said NO.
Who to have sex with after seeing: A virgin. In 1989.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
VideoDame Presents: Spacelord by Monster Magnet
Alright, time to pop this bitch, and what better to do it with a stoner-thrash-rock band that draws its core inspiration from my hometown of Las Vegas?
The what: I first came across the Making Of...of this video on MTV, and the station dutifully played it as they are wont to do for their own shills. But Monster Magnet is not your classic MTV story (or maybe it's so MTV that it's gone out of fashion). Dave Wyndorf, the goatee'd fella you see below locked himself in the now-defunct downtown casino The Plaza for two weeks to write this album and snort probably epic amounts of toot. Or toot epic amounts of snort. Whatever.
As for me, two guys behind me in chemistry class in high school when this video came out and used to casually lob the lines to each other, in a conversational tone as in: "I've been stuffed in your pocket, for the last thousand days." "You know, when I don't get my bath I take it out on the slaves?" "I left my throne a million miles away!" "I drink from your tit, I sing the blues every day!"
Yeah, we got a lot done in high school.
Here it is, in all its balls-out, pyrotechnic, cock-swinging glory:
The why: Now what's this got to do with sex and the Manifesto you ask? "I ate all the rest/and now I've gotta eat you" Just purely from the bombastic lyrics, which somehow never go over the top for how many blowaway lines they have right in a row this video alone should be activating my buttons.
But the thing itself! In between the pimped out lightbulb zoot suit, camera emphasis on everyone's damp, vinyl-covered crotch, the frankly ejaculatory fireworks display and the choreographed head banging by girls in red booty shorts, I'm giving myself a pass to talk this out to y'all and just saying that this whole fucking thing is so damnably, glorious self-explanatory in its unrepentant sleaze.
If you're not a little fuckin' dazzled you must have a shortage in your hard wiring, emphasis on the hard. Put it to you this way, this video is the best sex you'll probably have with a Las Vegas hooker. And I think in terms of larger scale, this video really informed the way LV the city markets itself now--as a big, huge, clean*, glam, blood orgy for the right people where the Dom and the ass flows freely. It's as commercial as it can be, my hometown, but it can make you feel damn good sometimes.
Who to have sex with after: Someone you're not afraid to hurt but can definitely laugh with when your handcuffs get stuck together, or something.
Watch carefully kids, yours truly,
VideoDame
*Clean is very strange but apt way to describe this video. Clean is something Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson et al kinda ....neglect, as you will see later.
The what: I first came across the Making Of...of this video on MTV, and the station dutifully played it as they are wont to do for their own shills. But Monster Magnet is not your classic MTV story (or maybe it's so MTV that it's gone out of fashion). Dave Wyndorf, the goatee'd fella you see below locked himself in the now-defunct downtown casino The Plaza for two weeks to write this album and snort probably epic amounts of toot. Or toot epic amounts of snort. Whatever.
As for me, two guys behind me in chemistry class in high school when this video came out and used to casually lob the lines to each other, in a conversational tone as in: "I've been stuffed in your pocket, for the last thousand days." "You know, when I don't get my bath I take it out on the slaves?" "I left my throne a million miles away!" "I drink from your tit, I sing the blues every day!"
Yeah, we got a lot done in high school.
Here it is, in all its balls-out, pyrotechnic, cock-swinging glory:
The why: Now what's this got to do with sex and the Manifesto you ask? "I ate all the rest/and now I've gotta eat you" Just purely from the bombastic lyrics, which somehow never go over the top for how many blowaway lines they have right in a row this video alone should be activating my buttons.
But the thing itself! In between the pimped out lightbulb zoot suit, camera emphasis on everyone's damp, vinyl-covered crotch, the frankly ejaculatory fireworks display and the choreographed head banging by girls in red booty shorts, I'm giving myself a pass to talk this out to y'all and just saying that this whole fucking thing is so damnably, glorious self-explanatory in its unrepentant sleaze.
If you're not a little fuckin' dazzled you must have a shortage in your hard wiring, emphasis on the hard. Put it to you this way, this video is the best sex you'll probably have with a Las Vegas hooker. And I think in terms of larger scale, this video really informed the way LV the city markets itself now--as a big, huge, clean*, glam, blood orgy for the right people where the Dom and the ass flows freely. It's as commercial as it can be, my hometown, but it can make you feel damn good sometimes.
Who to have sex with after: Someone you're not afraid to hurt but can definitely laugh with when your handcuffs get stuck together, or something.
Watch carefully kids, yours truly,
VideoDame
*Clean is very strange but apt way to describe this video. Clean is something Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson et al kinda ....neglect, as you will see later.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Part One: The Man-ifesto
Let's get some things clear kittens.
1) I don't work for MTV. Or MTV2. Or MTV Ocho. I have much more overall in me to hate them than to glorify them. MTV does not stand for quality music videos and maybe it never did. Regardless, they are the grand poobah of the genre and ignoring them or castigating them for pioneering successfully what others could not is pretty fucking stupid. MTV invented the modern music video. Accept it, and move on.
2) I'm not exactly a film scholar; in fact most film theory makes me retch. I mix up Oliver Stone and Martin Scorcese all the time. And you know what? I don't care. But that doesn't mean, I don't know my way around a mise en scene and auteur theory (which incidentally I personally subscribe to--in short that every film is about the creator) so don't try to snow me up with your "well your criticism is marred by Bazin's conjecture about..." rah rah elitist bullshit. Most film theorists need to shut up, and even more need to shut up because they don't recognize music videos for what they are--experimental short film.
3) Shut up.
That is above and beyond the sole foundation for this blog to be based: music videos are short films. Therefore films. Therefore art. Hard art too, because it has to be multi-disciplinary [look at all the dancing is in videos], work off another artist's previous work, and probably above all, let's face it, appeal to a mass commercial audience. You try doing that with your hands tied behind your hand by studios, divas, and screaming spittling rat teenagers on TRL. Don't make me trot out the names, the Spike Jonzes, the Haussmans, the McGs. B
"But McG directed Charlies Angels...Charlie's Angels was shit."
Of COURSE it was shit, but it was popular! And a big fucking break (and likely payday) from a snot-nosed white boy who goes by one name. So to the directors out there, this is why it pays to make these, it pays to do this beyond any petty, oh-what's-the-word noble reason like to make art. Music videos are commerce, fine; they occasionally become art. Because music videos can push It, they are an uncontrolled factory of culture, that comes from virtually nowhere! It is music of course, but it is also dance, it is fashion, it is politics, it is film.
The modern musical isn't dead, people. It moved.*
Music videos push it because oftentimes, at a certain point, the artist has nothing better to do than blow $250,000 on a 3 minute clip of them shaking their ass. And that, my friends, is the most glorious petri dish for social commentary I could ever possibly ask for.
4) And it even concerns, maybe even primarily concerns sex. Music is music is music, you feel it in your loins but the Media American gaze? Is a gaze. And it is male. And it wants sex, pulsating, throbbing, in your face sex. VH1 of all places used to have a show that for a half-hour just delighted the shit out of your nethers, because it placed together all the trashy lingerie, rippling abs, and cars fancier than your house in a series of bite sized pallets. It was delicious, and thereby, I do not dedicate this blog to MTV, the whiny poser who sold out his game to the highest bidder, but to VH1, the dowdier sister to the network, the one that probably read romance novels tucked between algebra books.
Okay, that's the manifesto! I will follow this up with a constantly updating FAQ about my goals and how to help me out, but these are the principles by which I'll conduct this project: in an honest, populist, salacious, intellectual manner.
Got that? Maybe replay it again, slower...
Video Dame
*Boy oh boy, when I get to Outkast, then will I go right the hell off.
1) I don't work for MTV. Or MTV2. Or MTV Ocho. I have much more overall in me to hate them than to glorify them. MTV does not stand for quality music videos and maybe it never did. Regardless, they are the grand poobah of the genre and ignoring them or castigating them for pioneering successfully what others could not is pretty fucking stupid. MTV invented the modern music video. Accept it, and move on.
2) I'm not exactly a film scholar; in fact most film theory makes me retch. I mix up Oliver Stone and Martin Scorcese all the time. And you know what? I don't care. But that doesn't mean, I don't know my way around a mise en scene and auteur theory (which incidentally I personally subscribe to--in short that every film is about the creator) so don't try to snow me up with your "well your criticism is marred by Bazin's conjecture about..." rah rah elitist bullshit. Most film theorists need to shut up, and even more need to shut up because they don't recognize music videos for what they are--experimental short film.
3) Shut up.
That is above and beyond the sole foundation for this blog to be based: music videos are short films. Therefore films. Therefore art. Hard art too, because it has to be multi-disciplinary [look at all the dancing is in videos], work off another artist's previous work, and probably above all, let's face it, appeal to a mass commercial audience. You try doing that with your hands tied behind your hand by studios, divas, and screaming spittling rat teenagers on TRL. Don't make me trot out the names, the Spike Jonzes, the Haussmans, the McGs. B
"But McG directed Charlies Angels...Charlie's Angels was shit."
Of COURSE it was shit, but it was popular! And a big fucking break (and likely payday) from a snot-nosed white boy who goes by one name. So to the directors out there, this is why it pays to make these, it pays to do this beyond any petty, oh-what's-the-word noble reason like to make art. Music videos are commerce, fine; they occasionally become art. Because music videos can push It, they are an uncontrolled factory of culture, that comes from virtually nowhere! It is music of course, but it is also dance, it is fashion, it is politics, it is film.
The modern musical isn't dead, people. It moved.*
Music videos push it because oftentimes, at a certain point, the artist has nothing better to do than blow $250,000 on a 3 minute clip of them shaking their ass. And that, my friends, is the most glorious petri dish for social commentary I could ever possibly ask for.
4) And it even concerns, maybe even primarily concerns sex. Music is music is music, you feel it in your loins but the Media American gaze? Is a gaze. And it is male. And it wants sex, pulsating, throbbing, in your face sex. VH1 of all places used to have a show that for a half-hour just delighted the shit out of your nethers, because it placed together all the trashy lingerie, rippling abs, and cars fancier than your house in a series of bite sized pallets. It was delicious, and thereby, I do not dedicate this blog to MTV, the whiny poser who sold out his game to the highest bidder, but to VH1, the dowdier sister to the network, the one that probably read romance novels tucked between algebra books.
Okay, that's the manifesto! I will follow this up with a constantly updating FAQ about my goals and how to help me out, but these are the principles by which I'll conduct this project: in an honest, populist, salacious, intellectual manner.
Got that? Maybe replay it again, slower...
Video Dame
*Boy oh boy, when I get to Outkast, then will I go right the hell off.
Watch this space, kittens
Tell all your friends. Besides the very imminent manifesto, I have a rather good opener for New Year's day, I rather think, about the man who brought sexy back and the woman that did it one more time and what they probably did (and didn't do) together that informed their post-breakup music videos. This ain't your mama's dissertation on gender theory.
I want my MTV/and my MTV wants me,
Video Dame
ETA: Damn, that manifesto wanted out quickly. Go see!
I want my MTV/and my MTV wants me,
Video Dame
ETA: Damn, that manifesto wanted out quickly. Go see!
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