Let’s Have a Kiki isn’t a retro video,but this summer’s gay anthem from one of my all time favorite bands, The Scissor Sisters. But really, what slumber party would be complete without this video? It has everything that you could possibly need: Faux drag queens, comedic spoken word opening, train stories, British voice-overs, bras as clothing, simple but awesome dance moves, onscreen lyrics, fabulousness, hot tambourine dudes, codpieces, cool new lingo and lots of swearing. Which reminds me, it’s NSFW because MTA stands for mother f%$ckers touching my ass!
Poor Jody! I hear your SOS and respond with Janet Jackson’s best video ever. What? F#$k right off with whatever sub-par Janet video has just popped into your head! I’m talking about Alright. No. Shut up. Stop arguing. I’m going to list the top 6 (out of a million) reasons that this video is the best Janet Jackson video, and possibly the best music video, that has ever been or ever will be.
6. Janet is every bit Michael’s little sister in this video. Check out her moves. Go on. Check them. And then get back to me.
5. She’s wearing a zoot suit. That’s right! A Z to the O Oot suit!
4. Not one dime of the video’s budget was used for CGI. It was all spent on a spectacularly swell 30s street set that is more detailed than most big Hollywood period pieces. (In your FACE, Cotton Club!)
3. Those details! Adorably retro and totally rad. Watch for a candy-colored baby carriage brigade, an old-school street washer and a camera shop facade so frivolously intricate, it’ll make you want to actually develop some film.
2. A sixty-something Cyd Charisse showing Janet how to do a fan kick. Janet can’t quite get her legs that high, but she has the good sense to appear appropriately reverent. Good going, Janet!
1. Cab EMM EFFING Calloway! In a yellow zoot suit. Yellow! Zoot! Suit! And yeah. He’s in his 80s in this video.
See? You see why you were wrong? Uh huh. Don’t ever doubt me again.
Aren’t you lucky? I randomly heard this blaring from the PF Chang’s parking lot last weekend. (No, I wasn’t eating at PF Chang’s.) The whole video’s pretty spectacular, but really, the reason we love it is the last minute, featuring the greatest outburst in a theater, ever. I like to think that she spent the last month or so of their terrible relationship quiet as a mouse, just knowing that he had tickets to Debussy or some equally lame symphony, and that she knew his boss would be there, and that he spent $400 per ticket, and that he got a demotion on Monday.
OK, so it’s not a video. It’s a movie clip. But I’m in Chicago for business, staying at the corner of Madison and Wabash, and I had to share something appropriate. I tried to think of Chicago-themed videos, but I could come up with was 1) songs sung by Chicago, and “Stay the Night” will likely be featured here someday; and 2) John Hughes movies.
But really, most teen movies in Chicago occurred in the suburbs, with occasional excursions into Big Scary Downtown, or Big Scary South Side. This movie was no different, except traveling into Big Scary Downtown was actually what the entire movie was about: stealing mom’s car, running away from home, clinging to the side of a building, Elisabeth Shue, and a slightly embarrassing, completely gratuitous musical number: this is what hijinks were all about.
P.S. If I remember correctly, my sister promptly asked for a wool duster and long scarf after the movie came out. I wonder if the few true geeks that lived in the 80s thought she was emulating the Fourth Doctor.
Back in the 80s, Madonna was pretty much the queen of everything. Queen of Pop, Queen of Videos, Queen of Rolling Around On The Floor in a Wedding Dress. Her videos were always earth-shattering–they even starred Danny Aiello, for cripes’ sake–everything she said made headlines, and what did she do as a result? She took what was most definitely her most adorable song to date, “True Blue,” and let the MTV hordes have at it. Their prizes included a Madonna-delivered check for $25,000, a Levis 501 wardrobe, Casio keyboards, and “enough Twix candybars to pay off the entire cast.”
This was in the days before iPhones and downloadable video editing software. It was, in fact, in the days when my school had Commodore 64s in the computer lab, and our vo-tech department had just gotten something called a “video toaster” to go with the “green screen.” But it was also when camcorders became more readily available, and, in fact, “Papa Don’t Preach” is video-ized by me and several friends, during a fateful slumber party at which we all ended up hating each other and my five-year-old brother is caught on tape, merrily drumming with invisible drumsticks in the background. (I promise we’ll get it converted to digital someday, although my sister may swear blood oath vengeance if I go public with her braceface.)
As I didn’t have cable, I missed the run of all the entries on MTV. But people of the internet: if you have a submission stashed away somewhere, please share it. The world wants to know.
Here’s the winner, by Angel Garcia and Cliff Guest. It’s as cute as the song, all decked out in innocent 50s Rebel-Without-A-Cause love and Brylcreem. Best part is that they were clearly costumed to evoke an earlier era, but you can’t hide 80s hair: note Depeche Mode in the high school dance scene.
And I would love to know: what happened to the Angel and Cliff? Where are you? Did you go on to make movies or did you rest on your 501-Levi’d behind? Tell us!
My brother gets married tomorrow, to a fabulous woman named Anne. I love them both and can’t wait until she’s in our family, so she can commence abusing him the way we big sisters always have. My daughter is one of her flower girls, and tomorrow is sure to be a long, exhausting day for all of us, and it’s going to be a blast.
In honor of the occasion, I wanted to post a wedding video. There’s “White Wedding,” of course, and that Dixie Chicks song from the awful Julia Roberts movie. I’m sure there are loads more. But none of them qualify so well as this 1986 classic from the Georgia Satellites: guys on a flatbed playing southern rock, tooling along a summer countryside, probably batting away mosquitoes and chiggers between guitar strums. Granted, this landscape looks too flat to be in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley, but it’s pretty damned close, what with the rockin’ spirit, spiked punch, humidity and tradition. All that’s missing here is the rigatoni, halupkes, and tarantella.
So Anne and Jimmy, here’s your e-card. Yeah, yeah, you say you’re not producing any nieces and nephews for at least another twelve or so years, so no shotguns will be involved. But an auntie can dream.
P.S. SO EXCITED for the rigatoni. And also wedding soup. There better be wedding soup.
Or to be more accurate, it 25 years ago last Saturday that Guns N’ Roses released Appetite for Destruction. Now, I know that Welcome to the Jungle might be the obvious choice for this week’s Friday Morning Videos, but I’ve got my reasons. Two of them. And they both involve the first 10 seconds of the video. First of all, come on! How can you NOT be impressed that the first act of a hair-metal video inspired a cheese-filled Broadway musical and an equally fromagey star-studded movie, nearly a quarter of a century later. That’s a lot of cheddar.
Second, it probably took less than an hour and forty bucks to film the “sweet, innocent Axl Rose gets off the bus” scene. I’m sure the actor they got to play The Hustler got paid in hair grease and Marlboro reds. Axl borrowed that suitcase from Slash’s mom (I assume). That just leaves the cost of sending an intern to the Ho Store for a slutty ho and slutty hose. Think about it. For the price of a fringed jacket on the clearance rack at Wilson’s, this video did something amazing. At the beginning (the beginning for Christ’s sake) of the LA metal scene, they summed the whole thing up in a package neater than whatever sock-and-duct-tape combo Axl shoved down the front of his plastic pleather trousers. “There will be hustlers waiting to take your shit as soon as you get off the bus, but hot damn! The chicks are super slutty!”
This week in the ‘Burgh it’s been nonstop thunderstorms, which is to say I’ve been totally grooving on the sounds of thunder and lightning, and it’s also no longer a humid 95 degrees. It’s a humid 70 degrees.
So, of course, I had to share this swell video, because Jon Bon Jovi is the Storm of baby-faced rockstars. Don’t believe me? Run it forward to 4:24.
This came up on my iPod the other day, and my youngest daughter–who is 17 months–immediately commenced the deep shoulder action, which goes to show how very primal the bassline is in this most excellent of songs.
And yes, this is the video that I saw, for the first time, on the night of “Amityville Horror 2: The Possession,” and it is quite unfairly associated with that movie. But what can you do?
slumber party movies 