I got next to nothing tonight. I’ve been running around all day, transporting kids and dealing with parent issues (watching a 77 year old Elvis impersonator in a nursing home is a remarkable experience, trust me). So it’s video night.
My daughter and her friend have been raiding my CD cabinet lately, which has prompted me to re-listen to a lot of bands I haven’t listened to in quite some time. One of those that came up was the Talking Heads, I didn’t listen to them much at the time they were really popular; it was only much later that I started to appreciate the complexity of what they’d been doing.
This was also at the dawn of the music video era and MTV, which added a unique visual element to musical experience, providing new artists with a whole new medium for exposure. Here is the Talking Heads official video for “Once in a Lifetime,” from 1981.
The first video ever aired by MTV — at 12:01 am on August 1, 1981 was the aptly titled “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the band, the Buggles.
The complete list of all the 100 videos MTV aired on that day is here (you will notice many are repeated). I was intrigued by this list, which includes many tracks I frankly had forgotten or never heard. Some of them seem astonishingly primitive today, many --if not most -- simply depicting the performer doing the song, and a few visual effects, much like you’d see in a stage performance. But some were more ambitious (the Talking Heads video above was also aired that day). Here is Todd Rundgren’s “Time Heals” (an excellent song, by the way, released as a 45 RPM single tucked inside the “Healing” album) in which Mr. Rundgren dances and appears to play air guitar at one point against a backdrop of surrealist paintings:
And then there were some unveiled that day that seemed to be in a class by themselves, making a statement that had never been seen before by a wide audience.
Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging” from his Lodger album, was one of those. The first two minutes were fairly conventional. But then, well, let’s just say it was Bowie sending his own message about the fluidity of gender identity to the future.
Hope everyone has a great night.