I’m a little late posting up this week’s music vid, but hey, it’s still before midnight, right? Just consider this my homage to the good old days of middle school, when we kids who lived out in the sticks had to stay up ’til the wee hours to see Friday Night Videos because we didn’t have cable service — and thus the holy font of all that was cool, circa 1983, MTV — like the lucky urbanites to the north.
This week’s selection is one I remember well from those late nights in a dark and chilly living room after my parents had gone to bed. I liked the song even before I saw the video, but the combination of wistful music with gritty black-and-white footage from the classic silent movie Metropolis seared its way into my geeky heart. Here’s Queen performing “Radio Ga Ga”:
My Loyal Readers will probably recall that the first LP I ever owned — at least the first that didn’t have the Disney logo or a Muppet on the cover — was Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog. Somewhat less well publicized is the second album I owned: Queen’s Greatest Hits. I didn’t fully appreciate them at the time — I just liked “Another Bites the Dust” and a couple other songs I’d heard on the radio — but Queen was a truly magnificent band. From their formation in 1970 through the untimely death of lead singer Freddie Mercury in 1991, they seemed to slide effortlessly (and largely successfully) from one sub-genre to another, from Zeppelin-style hard-rockers like “Hammer to Fall,” “Tie Your Mother Down,” or the sporting-stadium standard “We Will Rock You,” to rock-a-billy (“Crazy Little Thing Called Love”), funk (the afore-mentioned “Another One Bites the Dust”), tender ballads (“Who Wants to Live Forever,” “The Show Must Go On”), to catchy pop (“You’re My Best Friend,” “Somebody to Love”), and even movie themes (“Flash” from Flash Gordon, “Princes of the Universe” from Highlander). They could be both swaggeringly misogynistic (“Fat Bottomed Girls”) and — there’s no other way to say it — really damn gay (“Body Language”). And sometimes they were just wildly baroque and weird (the immortal “Bohemian Rhapsody”). I don’t like everything they did, but the great thing about Queen is that they seemed to have something for everyone. Don’t like this song? Just skip to the next track and you’ll probably like it fine. I can’t think of any other band that managed to dabble with so many different sounds and yet somehow retain a distinct aural identity.
I was heartbroken when I heard that Freddie had died. Rock — hell, music in general — has rarely heard a voice with his range, or seen a performer with his charisma.
And now, just because I brought it up — and because the Internet is a truly endless fountain of crap like this — here are the opening credits from Friday Night Videos. These graphics were as imprinted on my brain as any of the videos themselves:
And on that note, good night and sweet, nostalgic dreams to my Loyal Readers and all the ships at sea…
I’m batting zero here, buddy. The thing is, I remember watching MTV. But I was 11 and you 13 for most of 1983, and at that age we might as well have been 20 years apart. In the opening clip you played, I would have payed attention to A-ha and Dire Straits. You probably would have scoffed at such kids’ stuff.
No, not at all. I was as fascinated by those two videos you mention (a-ha’s “Take on Me” and Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”) as anybody. Especially the a-ha one, because of my interest in special effects. That weird, cartoony look was achieved with an old FX technique called rotoscoping. Disney used it quite a bit in Snow White to help the human characters move more realistically, and it was still being used in the original Star Wars trilogy to animate in the blaster fire. Neat stuff, another of those things that has more charm (if not realism) than CGI, in my humble opinion.
That Queen video probably caught my fancy back in the day because (a) I was familiar with the band and enough of a fan to pay attention to their latest effort, and (b) because it uses all that footage from Metropolis. I was already a fan of classic movies by that age, and of course a sci-fi geek from way back, and Metropolis is well-known in both camps.
Interestingly, I remember that movie being re-released around the same time period with a rock-and-roll soundtrack put together by Giorgio Moroder of Flashdance fame; as I recall, it featured work by Queen or Freddie Mercury pretty prominently, so I’d guess there was some kind of reciprocal deal between that project and this video. Just speculating, though. I really don’t know if there was a connection.