I CAN'T WAIT by Nu Shooz (1986)

My love, tell me what it’s all about…

With this lyric, Nu Shooz introduced themselves to the world. Though the Portland, Oregon band has been making funk-infused dance music since 1979, “I Can’t Wait” is the song and video that finally brought them worldwide exposure. But… what is it all about? That is the question.

Since the video’s debut in the summer of 1986, it’s been both entertaining and puzzling viewers with its bizarre eye candy graphics. What’s up with the slides and all the tools? Why is a baby shark being extracted from a coffee pot? Is there any special significance to that banana? These questions have plagued MTV, VH1 and YouTube audiences for decades.




In a 1986 MTV interview, Nu Shooz singer Valerie Day dismissed the baffled masses with a simple “either you get it or you don’t,” and she does have a point. Seeking precise meaning in music video imagery can be like searching for logic in a Nyquil dream – not something a rational person would spend too much time on. But for the irrationally curious out there, your lucky day has arrived! Director Jim Blashfield has been cool enough to share some inside information about the I CAN’T WAIT video, exclusively for Images of Heaven readers! Yes, for the first time, some light can be shed on this iconic eighties clip.

The story begins in Portland when John Smith and Valerie Day of Nu Shooz asked their buddy Jim to direct a video for their hot new single. The visionary behind the Talking Heads’ award-winning AND SHE WAS and Michael Jackson’s LEAVE ME ALONE among others, had a kooky concept for the Shooz. “I wanted to improvise it,” he says. “I didn’t want to plan it at all. I wanted the experience of just making it up from what was around when we got to the studio.”

So he loaded his car with biology slides, a coffeemaker, his kitchen table and lamp. At the studio he dug up a canvas backdrop and some phony saguaro cacti, procured a dumpster and some tools, then swiped a dog named Buster’s doghouse from a vacationing friend’s backyard. (One can only assume the eponymous “Buster” didn’t have a sunglasses face, as another pooch was cast in what should have been his role.)




Once the set was fully stocked with the perfect array of paraphernalia and pets, shooting could begin. But what exactly was being shot? Blashfield explains:

Besides being a promo for a band and a song, it is an experiment to see what results when you take a line from the video "tell me what it's all about" and decide that Valerie is a some kind of a scientist with an interest in small appliance repair instead of somebody waiting, lovesick, for a phone call, and let everything follow logically from that.

Logical or not, there is a kind of rhythmic reason to the clip; a left-of-center relevance that reveals itself from the introductory image: a piece of sheet metal upon which various objects are dropped. Wrenches, tools, a mini totem pole, a ripe banana. Could this be a clue that this woman is attempting to apply cold scientific analysis to mysterious realms like the human heart? Or is the banana in this case just a banana?




When the sheet metal is withdrawn we see the dog who’s not called Buster, sporting shades to shield his sensitive canine eyes from the massive voltage emanating from his electro-charged house. Against the wall a dumpster rigged with fishing wire opens and closes in time with the beat. Valerie – demonstrating a “great sense of playfulness as her song was absolutely misinterpreted,” according to Blashfield – sits at her desert desk, examining microscopic slides, asking what it’s all about.




Next she reaches for the drip percolator and seems pleasantly surprised to find a small plastic shark inside, swimming amongst the dregs. “If viewers look closely,” Blashfield says, “they may notice that happiness seems to be represented as a shark found lurking in a coffee pot, a metaphor which is certainly worth considering, if you ask me.”




How could a shark survive inside this coffee pot, you ask? The only logical thing to do is to take it apart and find out. So Valerie pulls out her tools and gets to work. As she dissects, her image bisects and splits apart, following the video’s theme of deconstruction and analysis. Over a blueprint, a magnet spins and Not-Buster makes a cameo appearance, perhaps offering another symbol of science being applied to love. Animal magnetism, or the unexplained force that draws two people together. How does it work?




At this point, Jim Blashfield’s willingness to experiment pays off in an unusual shot of the coffee percolator dividing into its various skeletal parts and spinning in front of Valerie’s head. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen many music videos in which a random inanimate object spends 10 or 15 seconds completely obscuring the face of the singer. Let’s pause and appreciate that for a moment, shall we?




As the sections whirl like wheels of the mind, they seem to illustrate one of the song’s repeated lyrics: Tell me what is on your mind. The sunglasses-wearing dog returns (blocking the singer’s face again!) to be hypnotized by a couple of shiny objects, and finally Valerie throws her hands up and decides to do it; to open Pandora’s Box.




In the end, her tinkering and probing delivers concrete results. She is showered in all knowledge known to humankind, taking the form of constantly morphing shapes – moons, rockets, butterflies and squiggles – courtesy of animator Roger Kukes. She withdraws a set of false teeth from the box and lets the teeth take a stab at lip-synching a line or two before the X motif (first seen in the opening shot of the sheet metal) returns to close the piece.




After some nifty post-production tricks and editing, I CAN’T WAIT was ready for its MTV premiere. “When the record company saw the video,” says Jim Blashfield, “they called it ‘unusual’ or perhaps ‘quite unusual’ or maybe ‘very unusual,’” but the MTV-ers and the band loved it. John Smith of Nu Shooz says:

No one captured our aesthetic like Jim. Years later I said to him, "Your style and ours meshed perfectly." To which Blashfield replied "I don't know if they meshed so much as they were congruent."… It was a pleasure and a privilege to work with him, and one of the high points of our career.

Spin magazine also had a positive reaction to I CAN’T WAIT in their August 1986 issue:

The video is very art-directed, and it’s nice. It’s kind of kitschy … except it’s restrained and minimal. It’s one of the genre of videos directed by people who wanted to be graphic designers or interior designers, not film directors. They’re into super graphics. They would rather be designing alarm clocks.

The director, who’s been making films and videos for decades, would probably disagree with that last statement. But the clip is definitely heavy on stylish “super graphics,” the likes of which have been tragically absent from music videos for many years.




And that’s what it’s all about! A grand experiment in the uniting of pop music and images that constantly picks apart and analyzes objects, lyrics, ideas, yet ultimately defies literal interpretation. “That was our intention,” says Blashfield. “To do stuff that bent the expected trajectory or looked deeper or cast light and attention on subjects, images and ways of seeing things that were often overlooked.”

Nearly 25 years after it was made, I hereby pronounce I CAN’T WAIT a successful experiment. I for one will never look at a coffee pot the same way again.

DON'T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME by the Police (1980)

DON’T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME is the first music video I remember seeing in my life. The original 1980 video, that is, not the stroke-inducing 1986 remix.

I have this faded yet definite memory of playing on the floor in front of the television (which usually broadcasted cartoons or Sesame Street), looking up at the screen and seeing three blonde men in graduation caps and gowns bouncing around a classroom. I didn’t know what to make of it.

Although these men weren’t singing on a stage, they were definitely performing a song. But it wasn’t the theme song for a TV show, and these weren’t any actors I’d ever seen. I was pretty sure it couldn’t be a commercial because I didn’t see any cereal, shampoo or coffee. I was confused. What was I seeing?




Turns out it was a band called the Police in a thing called a “rock video,” kids! Shot on a shoestring by director Derek Burbidge about a year before MTV planted its flag on the moon and brought video culture to America.

By today’s standards DON’T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME seems ridiculously simple and cheap. But given how bloated and self-important music videos have become in the past 15 years or so, there’s something refreshing about revisiting a clip from 30 years back, when rock bands were loosely corralled before 16mm cameras to half-heartedly mime along with one of their 3-minute songs. The results of these brief, unpolished sessions were often crude little gems that captured more spark and natural charisma than any big-budget video produced today.




The clip begins with a pretty teenager whispering to her friend, then cuts to a bespectacled Sting grading papers at his desk. The set-up and the tension are immediately established in these first few shots, before the song’s vocals even begin. When the lyrics do kick in, they describe a simple dilemma: cute teacher, flirtatious young student. Sting’s reference to Lolita (“that book by Nabokov”) is hardly necessary for us to see where this is headed.




The song by now is the stuff of legend, steeped in rumors that it was based upon Sting’s years spent teaching school before the band took off. I guess when an ex-teacher writes a song about a teacher, it’s only natural to assume the inspiration was taken from a real experience. But considering the fact that Sting taught five-to-seven-year-olds in his pre-Police days, DON’T STAND is clearly not autobiographical. It’s simply a piece of fiction.

The outcome of this fictional piece remains ambiguous. Does the teacher ever act on his desires or not? That’s the beauty of the song and the video – it’s more intriguing if we don’t know. There is no narrative to be found and certainly no deliberate exploitation of the potentially controversial subject matter (unless you count Sting’s striptease toward the end). Mostly Sting, Andy and Stewart just smoke cigarettes, throw spit-balls, pretend to play their instruments and bop around in their tennis shoes, oblivious to the students milling about and passing notes. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than two hours to shoot.




It is undocumented whether Sting was asked to remove his shirt or he did it spontaneously. Perhaps it was getting stuffy under the hot lights and he needed air. At any rate, it’s obvious that the man instinctively knew how to sell his sex appeal and wasn’t shy about marketing his looks along with his talent.




As critic Myles Palmer wrote in 1981:

He [Sting] has some of the charm of Paul McCartney, some of the toughness of John Lennon and some of the athleticism of Rod Stewart. He is a rock conquistador, impossibly handsome, self-assured and impossibly successful. He is the personification of pop charisma.

And he knew it. You can almost see him thinking, “Let’s give the viewers at home a treat” as he unbuttons his shirt with a sly grin.




As a little girl, I didn’t get the video. I didn’t even understand what it was supposed to be. But it lodged itself in my mind and I never quite forgot the experience of seeing it. Come to think of it, DON’T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME was probably the ideal first music video experience – the Police bringing their sexy rock-n-roll attitude into the classroom. What better training ground for a future videophile?

All you kids heading back to school this week: this one’s for you.