BIG IN JAPAN by Alphaville (1984)

What was it about the early and mid-eighties that made the Western population so hungry for Eastern culture? Between TURNING JAPANESE by the Vapours (1980), VISIONS OF CHINA by Japan (1981), CHINA by Red Rockers (1983), CHINA GIRL by David Bowie (1983) and Murray Head’s ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK (1985), not to mention the countless other Asian-themed videos by the likes of Culture Club, INXS and Wham!, mid-eighties MTV was practically a love letter to the Orient.





One of the best Asian-influenced songs and videos to emerge from this trend was Alphaville’s BIG IN JAPAN, yet it might also be the most forgotten. You see, there is a serious risk involved when your pop group is new on the scene and you call your first video “BIG IN JAPAN.” This could be interpreted as an ominous prediction of your impending failure to follow up initial successes, leaving you forgotten in the US and the UK, but still a favorite with audiences in some other remote locale. Say… Japan, for instance. Yet those devil-may-care Teutons of Alphaville brazenly opted to seal their fate in just such a manner with their debut single “Big in Japan,” an uber-synthesized, melancholy nod to our neighbors in the Far East.

German trio Alphaville burst onto the scene with their 1984 album Forever Young, but soon succumbed to their self-prophesized Big in Japan Curse, failing to chart any more hits and quickly becoming a Top 40 footnote. Though the song actually has less to do with Japan than desperation and loneliness, the brilliant music video uses traditional Japanese images contrasted with bleak, somber-hued city scenes to create an outstanding piece of eighties art.




Director Dieter Meier (of the Swiss electronic group Yello) clearly had a gift for constructing experimental visual effects that captured the current zeitgeist, yet today seem refreshingly original when contrasted with many other music videos of the same time period. Opening with a brightly colored Japanese fish motif, the video quickly switches to darker images such as distressed abstractions projected over the faces of the band members and stop motion geisha make-up being applied to the face of a distinctly non-Asian brunette.




The concept of using blankly staring human faces as canvases for abstract expressionism somehow fits the lonely, mechanized music and chilly lyrics. The idea of humans standing in the dark, their bodies used as living movie screens for an unseen audience, effectively echoes one of the song’s themes of flash-in-the-pan fame and the hollow lifestyle that accompanies it. These moments contain the video’s most memorable icons, such as an animated film of a reel-to-reel tape player on the bare chest of singer Marian Gold.




Most of the scenes in BIG IN JAPAN are starkly simple reminders that often in music videos, less is more. Lead singer Gold either performs the vocals while standing in front of a rear-projected backdrop or surrounded by his mates on a barren, post-apocalyptic stage while their shadows loom large behind them. The images on the screens keep changing, a neverending parade of slightly varied visuals from lightning to red-hot sparks to flashing neon. Despite the video's simplicity, there's never a dull moment.




Gold then interacts with – yet never gets very close to – the icy brunette whose look alternates between typical 1980s party wear and full-fledged Japanese geisha attire. Is there an implied statement about the Westernization of Japan in these images? Or perhaps a comment on the Easternization of Europe and America during their '80s Asian culture obsession.




Although the BIG IN JAPAN clip holds up well enough to survive a nuclear holocaust, I wish the same could be said for the bulky, homemade-looking New Wave clothing worn by the band. The worst of these ensembles include a glorified Hefty bag jumpsuit cinched at the waist with an artichoke-inspired belt and a giraffe-spotted boat-neck tee with mid-length sleeves, worn snugly tucked into a pair of jeans so tight they rival those worn by the band Survivor. Even as a fan of ‘80s fashion I cannot condone the flagrant misuse of fabric in this video.




But I guess the off-the-wall fashions were just a piece of the overall puzzle that is the band Alphaville, a name they swiped from that master of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard. Clearly this is a band that embraced New Wave and all it stood for, from their name right down to their belts. Like so many other casualties of eighties pop culture, Alphaville’s artistic efforts can only be seen today on YouTube, or when VH1 Classic pulls them out of the vault. Although I’m sure they’re still big… elsewhere.

LAISSE TOMBER LES FILLES by France Gall (1964)

Joyeux 14 Juillet, and happy Bastille Day! In honor of France’s fête nationale, let’s take a closer look at teen queen France Gall’s LAISSE TOMBER LES FILLES video from 1964.




While Richard Lester and the Beatles are often credited with inventing the modern music video in their 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, the French had been making pop promo clips since 1960. They were called Scopitones and they were all the rage for a while.




The Scopitone was a big clunky console with a 26-inch screen and a selection of 16mm color film clips accompanied by songs – a primitive music video jukebox. Though the technology never quite caught on in the States, the machines were fixtures in French nightclubs until the late 1960s and hundreds of pre-MTV clips were filmed and played for the drop of a coin. Most Scopitone videos featured scantily clad women doing the twist, scantily clad men doing the hully-gully, or some campy/sexy combination of these two.




What allows the LAISSE TOMBER LES FILLES Scopitone clip to stand the test of time is its innocence and simplicity. No gyrating in a bikini or seducing the camera for 16-year-old Gall; she actually looks like a typical clean-cut teen. Though as the ‘60s wore on she would gradually lighten her hair to platinum and wear heavier make-up, in LAISSE she was still freshly scrubbed, auburn-haired and sporting an outfit she might have worn to school that day.




In fact, the clip is appropriately set in a classroom and features the pop singer writing some of the song’s lyrics on a chalkboard and lecturing the boy who broke her heart. “Drop the girls,” She tells the young philanderer, “or one day, they’ll drop you… one day, it’s you who will cry.”




Written for Gall by the notoriously naughty songsmith Serge Gainsbourg, “Laisse Tomber les Filles” is a surprisingly sweet, perceptive and empowering take on a young girl’s moral triumph over her two-timing guy. “Yes, I cried,” she admits, “but I will not cry anymore.” Meanwhile, in the video her blonde beau smooches and canoodles with every girl in sight, oblivious to her warnings and melodic admonishments. Quel cad!




We Americans are probably most familiar with April March’s French cover version and the clever English loose translation she recorded in 1995, but neither could match the charm of Gall’s original. March has a sweet voice, but France Gall had an authentic adolescent squeak to her vocalizing that was uniquely hers. Her spunky, vibrato-free intonations almost break as they stretch to reach certain notes, but somehow always manage to hang in there.

Vive la France! And vive la France Gall!

Happy 25th Anniversary, MONEY FOR NOTHING by Dire Straits (1985)

The summer of 1985. Has it really been 25 years since those halcyon days of rubber band bracelets and Pespi Free? A quarter of a century sure flies by.

At that point MTV had been around for four years and had seen its share of japes and parodies, but 1985 seems to mark the moment when music video officially became self-referential. Every time you turned on the channel there was someone demonstrating the ridiculousness of the medium while simultaneously glorying in it (and reaping hefty profits from video’s boost to record sales).



In JUST A GIGOLO, David Lee Roth crashed the “sets” of popular music videos, electrocuting a Billy Idol lookalike and wrestling with Cyndi Lauper’s double. Phil Collins’ DON’T LOSE MY NUMBER clip featured the singer in a variety of familiar video roles – he’s Elton John at the beach, Sting in high-contrast black and white, and Rik Ocasek with his head on a fly’s body. Madonna was sending up Marilyn in MATERIAL GIRL, Weird Al was sending up Madonna in LIKE A SURGEON and the Motels were sending up the commercialism of their own MTV image in SHAME. In 1985, biting the hand that fed them was all the rage among rock stars.



Amidst 1985’s slew of scathing lampoons and good-natured mockery, one clear triumph emerges: Dire Straits’ MONEY FOR NOTHING video. From the moment it premiered in July, MONEY FOR NOTHING was an instant classic placed on MTV’s “power rotation,” which was one step above “heavy rotation.” Power rotation meant that viewers were seeing the video roughly every five minutes, or at least so it seemed.



And why wouldn’t MTV want the clip aired night and day? Any subversive skewering of video culture in MONEY FOR NOTHING was deep beneath the glossy surface. To the layman’s eye, it was just one big commercial for Music Television, filled with moonman logos and chants of “I want my MTV!”



How the song was written is the stuff of rock legend by now – Mark Knopfler visited a New York appliance store that featured a wall of TV sets tuned to MTV, overheard a worker’s tirade about how he shoulda learned to play the gee-tar to get his money for nothing (and chicks for free), applied a ZZ Top-esque guitar riff to it, and a hit was born. Sting just happened to be in the recording studio at the time and came up with the “I want my MTV” line to the tune of the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and the final touch was added.



But the story could have ended there. According to video director Steve Barron, “the problem was that Mark Knopfler was very anti-videos. All he wanted to do was perform, and he thought that videos would destroy the purity of songwriters and performers.” Knopfler was willing to grant Barron a live clip, but MTV wanted a strong concept. And Steve Barron had one in mind.

Earlier in ‘85, Peter Conn had directed a video called BONGO BONGO for the Steve Miller Band, in which the Bosch FGS-4000 CGI system was used to create some animation mixed in with the 35mm film footage.



Though the BONGO BONGO clip never got much airplay, Barron and the guys at Rushes in London made history by using the same Bosch technology to animate entire scenes in MONEY FOR NOTHING after the ice was broken. Once Knopfler's girlfriend wrenched a grudging nod of approval from the singer/songwriter for the concept video, the animation team went to work.

In what was a cutting-edge (and painstaking) process at the time, animators Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair created Sal, a gruff cigar-chomping handyman based on Joe Pesci’s Raging Bull character Joey, Sal’s vidiot buddy Harv and Harv's dog. They then invented some videos for them to critique (in pre-Beavis and Butthead fashion) and the rest wrote itself, right down to the “heavy rotation” in-joke for the boys at MTV.



While crude by today’s standards, the CGI characters in MONEY FOR NOTHING are perfect for the video world they inhabit: the assembly line monotony of blue collar work. The slow-moving repetition of primitive computer animation effectively contrasts the vibrant music video stratosphere of Dire Straits performing live (from concert footage in Budapest); the geometric workmen are yesterday’s model robots, programmed to haul fridges and microwaves for eternity and bitch about never becoming rock stars.



But what exactly is being parodied in MONEY FOR NOTHING? In the song, Knopfler clearly takes the tone of devil’s advocate, ironically voicing an ignorant, derogatory take on his own profession of rock musician. Yet, if Knopfler himself is “anti-videos,” isn’t he partly siding with the blue collar criticism of the hollow MTV lifestyle? Is Sting celebrating the channel that made him famous, poking fun at it, or mocking himself? After all, he did appear on an MTV ad in 1982, earnestly demanding his right to the channel.



So as we watch the “futuristic” animated characters in a Dire Straits video, they watch a wall of Dire Straits videos, commenting on the video from within the video. The effect created is self-referential to an infinite degree, like a wall of mirrors reflecting a wall of mirrors. Particularly now that the video is 25 years old, and we see it through the added layer of time, through a telescopic lens of the future.



The major difference between the summer of 1985 and the summer of 2010 is not the quality of CGI technology, it’s that Sal and Harv were watching videos on MTV, and we know how impossible that is today. The trouble with our times, as Paul Valéry once observed, is that the future is not what it used to be. “I want my YouTube” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.