Music Videos That Cost Tens of Dollars

Nothing says “trying to save a couple of ducats” like casting possibly real homeless people in your music video. (Even if they’re actors, they’re still saving on wardrobe.) Wind machine rental seems to have been a fixed cost when it came to 1980s music videos, and I think the makers of “Rise” offset it by filming on laundry/carpet agitation day.

Am I the only person totally creeped out by music videos where someone with strange hair stares at me through the TV screen in such a way to imply that he’s trying to make some sort of deep emotional connection?

I have it on good authority that the songs odd lyrics are about South African apartheid. Certainly a worthy cause, but I wonder if such songs are well on the way to seeming as quaint as Little Orphan Annie ranting against FDR.

Do you want to find the exact video that heralded the end of the 1980s? You could make the argument that this is it. Perhaps the last great “love sucks” song, a genre that infested the 80s like “dead boyfriend” songs infested the 1950s. You can tell the people who made this video didn’t have their hearts in it. As I remember it, the occasional out-of-sync vocals were a feature of the video on TV, not just because it’s streaming now.

I really liked Jane Child’s self-titled album. It’s too bad that the music press at the time couldn’t seem to get past the fact that she had a nose ring and dreadlocks.

Admittedly, this video cost more than tens of dollars. In fact, I believe it was the first video ever to cost $1 million to make. What I find amazing is that they made it at all. What the hell is the deal with the windmill? The fire pots? The legions of dancing post-apocalyptic mutants? The guy with the faux-hawk doing the funky chicken? It’s like the world was destroyed in a nuclear war, and society was rebuilt based on the principles of the only surviving document from the Before Times, that document being the ‘Satan’s Alley’ Broadway show from Staying Alive (1983).

Special props to the profoundly creepy animatronic head. It’s a very special prop indeed.

Add together the worst parts of that Toto video, a former sample band with an Illuminatus! Trilogy obsession, sets and a costumes apparently inspired by the Japanese space opera Message from Space (1978), and Tammy Wynette, and what do you get besides a combination of words never before used together in all of human history? This K.L.F. video.

If you’re wondering, the actual members of The K.L.F. are the guys dressed like Evil’s henchmen in Time Bandits (1981).

Things I learned from this video:

- Librarians can stamp your passport.

- This may be because Africa only exists in books. Or possibly in dusty libraries.

- Dusty libraries use oil lamps and electric lamps at the same time.

- Playing keyboard for an easy listening band is so hard you need to wear sweatbands.

- Wild dogs look for “solitary company.” Not good with oxymorons, those wild dogs.

- “Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus over the Serengeti.” So Olympus is in Africa too?

- “Serengeti” is hard to fit into a song meter.

I’ve never heard of Scatterbrain before, but the lead singer looks kinda like David Lee Roth, if David Lee Roth were affordable enough that he got hired to do Bar Mitzvahs.

Holy crap! The Corinthian!

At 0:44 – I love how they put a bar over the glasses in the “reflections,” presumably because the recursion was causing feedback.

Today’s budget tip: a twenty-foot long segment of pipe looks twice as a long if you’re filmed walking down it in two completely different outfits.

Because sometimes one androgynous keyboard player just isn’t enough.

Did you know Shakira is a recording artist? It’s true! She has albums and everything. And here I thought she was just my every fetish come magically to life.

I have no idea what this song is about. All that really matters is that it led to this video, inspired in equal measures by anime, Goth fashion, and David Lynch movies.

At 2:31 in — is that a product placement? Or is Shakira a were-car?

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