Great Music Videos: 'High High to Low Lows' by Lolo Zouai

 

Of all the videos that are a day in the life this may be my favorite.  I love the fact that the video was shot by Lolo and a friend and then produced by somebody in what looks like their apartment.  It looks like it was shot in one night, maybe two and we are just hanging out with her wherever this is.  Hanging out at a food joint, riding on the subway.  We've got great shots of her lip syncing to the camera.  But what makes it all work is the song that the video goes with.  It fits the song perfectly.  I cannot imagine a better video for this song than what she created.  So let's take a look at this song.  By the way you can read the review of this album here, http://www.heathpost.com/2020/01/album-reviews-lolo-zouai-and-camila.html.

First let's look at the lyrics to the song.  We get this opening verse.  

I can't say I've been doing okay, I've been doing okay
(Ouais ouais ok)
And I can't wait to really get paid not just minimum wage, yeah
(Ouais ouais je sais)
Fake gold on my hoops, real rips in my pants
They think it's all Gucci, but it's 99 cents
I swear, yeah, yeah, I swear

In the video she's mostly going around town in a pullover shirt and jeans and looks like any other young person who maybe just got off work and is heading home or hanging out with friends.  Nothing fancy very down to earth.  We get these occasional shots of her dressed up, looking like she's going out with friends to go clubbing but because of the way this is shot, there is nothing glamorous about it.  Again it feels very real and earthy and in Lolo we see someone who is this down to earth person who has dreams of being more.  But we can still see the down to earth person.  

Now in the pre-chorus we get into the heart of the song.

Ooh, you wanna help me
Ooh, you wanna fly me out to LA
Dreams you wanna sell me
I took a bite, that's a gold plate, a gold plate

OK so in this pre-chorus we get the idea that she's been offered a chance to make a record or sign a deal or something and was flown to LA to find out it was all fake.  So she's real, but this world is fake.

So why does she go from highs to lows let's look at verse 2. 

Real diamonds, I want 'em, but I can't find them
Timing, he said it's just bad timing
Lying, all I got from you was silence (Ouais ouais ok)
No gold on my neck
No 0's on my check
I swear, I swear (I swear)

So the real high was getting this offer to come to LA.  She has real dreams, she wants success, but when that turned out to be fake she felt real lows.  So from real highs to real lows.  

Knowing this the video has so much more depth.  She wants to be famous.  She wants to be a star.  She wants diamonds and real gold and success.  Match these expressions with how the video is shot.   She just looks like anybody.  Someone just getting through the day, hanging out with friends, riding the subway, but she has dreams.  We see the flashes of her dressed for clubbing and we can see the vulnerability that dreams like that can bring on a person.  

Just a brilliant video for a brilliant song, that I have learned to like more and more over these past 4 years. 

Great Music Videos: 'Tighten Up' by The Black Keys

 

OK this is just a fun video.  It really doesn't have much to do with the song but it's a fun way to present the song and just shows what fun you can have with music videos. 

Great Music Videos: 'Steppin Out' by Joe Jackson

 

I loved this video from the first time I saw it.  First it's a great song.  And then the video brings in just about everything you'd want.  It has a little story and it has great visuals they setup to go with the music.  I've always liked the end of the video where Joe Jackson comes out onto the sidewalk as everything is closing down.  

Great Music Videos: 'Your Wildest Dreams' by Moody Blues

This is a really fun project--again, great idea, Matthew.

So this is yet another song that came out during our senior year at Heath, 1985-86. This one comes late in the school year--April 9, 1986--so it's an unabashedly sentimental song intersecting at an unabashedly sentimental time for 17-year-old, naturally sentimental me. So the point is that it almost couldn't miss with me if the song and video were any good at all. And, to this day, I think they are both just beautiful. 

First, check out Justin Hayward's simple, elegant and rich lyrics:

Once upon a time
Once when you were mine
I remember skies
Reflected in your eyes
I wonder where you are
I wonder if you think about me
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams 

Once the world was new
Our bodies felt the morning dew
That greets the brand-new day
We couldn't tear ourselves away
I wonder if you care
I wonder if you still remember
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams 

And when the music plays
And when the words are touched with sorrow
When the music plays
I hear the sound I had to follow
Once upon a time 

Once beneath the stars
The universe was ours
Love was all we knew
And all I knew was you
I wonder if you know
I wonder if you think about it
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams

I would love to write something that clear and pretty some day. 

Second, there's the video itself. I cannot recommend enough the great Wikipedia page for this song. The most striking part about it for me was how Hayward heaps praise on the machine around his work for the success of this video--that the record company identified the song as a likely hit to be featured before he did and that it was Director Brian Grant who came up with the crucial idea to cast a younger band as the Moody Blues in their youth.

Let's talk more, in fact, about Brian Grant's great choices. 

I was around records and loud music from the very start. I'm the baby of four, and my siblings were all between 11 and 16 years old when I was born in 1968. I'm here to tell you that records and loud pop music were everywhere. 

My oldest brother was and is a huge Moody Blues fan. When I was 3, my mom would sometimes drop me off at his college apartment in Evansville. One of the tales that still gets told around our family gatherings is how I would sometimes go to retrieve one of Sam's or his roommates' records off the floor--except I would get in a hurry and try picking up the far end of the album while my toes were still on the near end and I would break the record in half. One album I absolutely remember being around (though not breaking) is Our Children's Children's Children. I loved studying that cover--especially the inner gatefold. Brian Grant's phantasmagorical opening to "Your Wildest Dreams" against the song's first sounds of whooshing, howling winds (adjectives from YouTube's closed captions) is brilliant in terms of recalling images from that and other albums of the Moody Blues' early years.

Then there's the thing about the younger band playing the Moody Blues in the flashbacks. They're called Mood Six, and they had formed in 1982 and had quite a lengthy career together. I think Grant is pretty clearly right (according to Hayward in the Wikipedia article) that the Moody Blues playing their younger selves would've been distracting. But I also wonder if finding an actual, existing band to play them (as opposed to casting various younger actors) was key for conveying the close and covenantal relationship that we viewers would've needed to believe the younger Hayward had with his bandmates back then, in order to be willing to leave behind his young love. 

There's also the clever back and forth between black-and-white and color scenes, as well as the just-enough sprinkling in of lighter images of other bandmates with the maharishi and groupies. But I need to actually get to work, and so let's go ahead and get straight to the woman. 

I'm unclear whether Janet Spencer-Turner is playing both the current and younger versions of Justin Hayward's first love. Whatever, she/they is/are great. When this video came out, of course, I had no woman from my past (or current) to be sentimental about, but this woman/these women was/were perfect for 17-year-old me to pine for being one day being sentimental about. The key moment of the performance(s) comes at about 4 minutes when the current version decides to break away from her family to go see the Moody Blues concert and the younger version looks at her with a sense of foreboding. It explains to us viewers that--again, back then--there was a reason why the woman chose not to go all in on accompanying Justin Hayward wherever his art took them. 

So, in conclusion: Wow. What a Great Music Video "Your Wildest Dreams" is! And what a terrific product of collaboration across disciplines and decades of experience. I'm thankful for everyone with a hand in it--Justin Hayward, the rest of the Moody Blues, Brian Grant, Mood Six, Janet Spencer-Turner and all of the rest of them. I loved it at 17, and I love it in same and different ways now at 55.

Great Music Videos: 'Home Sweet Home' by Mötley Crüe

I'm glad Matthew prompted for "Great Music Videos" and not necessarily our favorites, because I do think this video (from the "Videos That Are About the Band, Following Them on Tour, Seeing Them Traveling and Doing Sound Checks" category) deserves special notice.

Look, I'm no Mötley Crüe guy. Most all of these acts always turned me off, and I don't even have nostalgic interest in any of them beyond a few Van Halen, KISS and AC/DC moments. But I do feel respect must be paid for the fact, when MTV came up with the bright idea of a request-line program in February 1986, that Mötley Crüe fans mobilized to dominate the voting for 90 straight days, and they (apparently) didn't even have to get their Russian friends involved to cheat.

Dial MTV finally had to create the "Crue Rule," in order to break the "Home Sweet Home" spell. I, for one, was thankful. But I have no question, if MTV rolled back out their 1-800 number for a reboot this year, that the Classes of 1986 from high schools around this great nation would turn out in tremendous numbers to give the "Baby Sharks," "Sweet Child O' Mines," "Gangnam Styles," "Hey Ya!s" and "I Would Always Love Yous" all they ever wanted and more.

Great Music Videos: 'Alive and Kicking,' Simple Minds

Thanks, Matthew, for getting this series going. Here's the second video I thought of after reading your introductory post.

I'm pretty sure that I saw this video debut on MTV in September 1985. Remember how they used to do that? They'd announce they'd be showing a video for the first time at whatever time, and then on would come Alan, or J.J., or Nina, or Mark, or Martha, at that time to introduce the video with appropriate fanfare. I'm pretty sure the first time I saw "Alive and Kicking" was during this treatment.

I wasn't much of a Simple Minds fan before this video, and I feel confident I'd never heard this song before seeing this video. But immediately the video just totally grabbed me. I thought it was the song that I liked so much, and so I went out and bought the album at Camelot in the Kentucky Oaks Mall at some point that autumn of our senior year at Heath. I listened to the record all the way through once or twice, but I quickly got to the point where I pretty much just dropped the needle on "Alive and Kicking" and yanked it back off after that song had played.

And then it wasn't long after that before I realized it was the video I loved. I liked the song, but I loved the video. "Alive and Kicking" would fall into Matthew's Category 2, "Videos That Are Really Made to Be a Visual that Goes Along With the Music." I was a 17-year-old boy ready to get out of my parents' house on Cairo Road in Paducah, Kentucky, and here came Jim Kerr with his exotic friends inviting me with a striking Scottish travelogue into kicking, free life with all of its dramatic waterfalls, piercing sunsets and giant drums. Indeed, within a year, I was on my (self-perceived) own in college in Bowling Green, making my own discoveries, such as the rocky embankments along the Barren and Green rivers north of town.

I learned this morning from super Wikipedia that the video was actually shot "near the town of Hunter, at North–South Lake in the Catskill Mountains of New York State." Which is fine. Simple Minds was from Scotland, and the place they found to make their video looked like what I imagined Scotland to look like. But, regardless of exactly where on God's green Earth that it was shot, the "Alive and Kicking" video is no bait and switch. It's a brilliantly executed brochure for the gift of Life, More Life, wherever we have to get ourselves to receive and embrace its wild abundance.

Great Music Videos: What Is a Great Music Video?

 What is a great music video?  Well I'm pretty sure that is something that differs for everyone.  But I would say there are different types.  

1. There are the videos that tell a little story to go with the song.  I tend to really like these.  Some songs really lend themselves to these videos and some artists do a good job of coming up with little stories to go along with their song.  I always think back to ABC and their first album and the film Mantrap they made to go with the entire album.  Such a great idea.  But one example that I think of when I think of this is "Brass In Pocket" by The Pretenders.  They created a little story to go with a song that really doesn't have a story as part of the song.  

2. There are videos that are really made to be a visual that goes along with the music.  These can be abstract, animated, whatever.  A good example of this I would say is Adele's "Rolling In the Deep" one of my daughters favorite videos.  I asked her once why she liked it so much and she talked about how it rhythmically went so well with the music.  If you think of that when you watch it you'll get what she means.  

3. There are the videos that are about the band, following them on tour, seeing them traveling and doing sound checks.  Those can be fun and there are some that I think really work.  One of my favorites in this category would be "Hang With Me" by Robyn.

4. Then you have some that are essentially a snapshot of a time or place that work with the song.  An example of this would be "Small Town" by John Mellencamp. 

I'm sure there are other types, but I would say these are the four primary types of videos.  I wouldn't count live videos in this.  There are the ones where a band are just setup in a room playing their music, but I don't know that I've ever seen one of those I find interesting, unless they bring in other elements.  For instance Sade did back to back videos of "Sweetest Taboo" and "Is It a Crime" where she and the band are playing, but they are interspersed with a story video.  

 

So of the types of video that I believe can be great, I would say there are only 4.  So what makes a great video?

Well again I believe that is personal preference, but I do believe there are some elements that you will find consistent.  

First it has to be a song you actually don't mind listening to.  It doesn't have to be your favorite song, but I believe for the video to really connect with you it can't be a song you actively dislike.  That makes sense right.  If you're like my wife and you can't stand Sade, then chances are you aren't going to like any Sade videos.  

Second I believe the video has to be structured around the song.  In the case of the visuals this is a given, but you can really mess up a story video or a time and place video if you don't connect them well to the song.  Sometimes I think artists get so lost in the visual they want to create that the visual overwhelms the song itself.  Now I understand this is an artistic choice, and it can lead to interesting looking videos, but I believe you will find fewer people who really connect with it in a meaningful way.  

Lastly it has to set the right tone.  Look if you are going to have a serious song about poverty you kind of need to respect that in the video.  You might say well isn't this just part of structuring it around the song.  I would say that tone is it's own thing.  You can have a great video that structurally works with the song in rhythm and with lyrics, but just misses the mark in tone.  Problem with this and why I see this as a separate thought is that tone is something that is very personal.  The artist may see the song in a completely different way than the listener.  They will attach it to something in their life that prompted them to write it maybe and for the listener it may attach to a moment in time that has a very different tone.  

So all this is to introduce a new topic here on the Heath Post called Great Music Videos.  Where we can post about music videos we think are great and explain why.