Link from some kind social media — can’t find the source, but as a notion? A single video that changed everything as a point of inception.
Pick a single music video that mattered. One that weathered. An image, a song and its music video, what’s a single music video that mattered?
From one feed, there was a link to Frankie Goes to Hollywood — the video for the song — Relax (previously linked and probably available via individually preferred outlets).
That song’s original release date, 10/24/83, with the video that was probably deemed “X” rated, and the club cut was seriously right up rife and ripe with fetishes, rampant, glorified homosexuality, and other — to some — disturbing images. A little slice of life seen through a musical lens. Be more like cable news, these days.
From a literary understanding, it was at the beginning of the music video age, and set itself apart from the seemingly mindless mass of pop singers mouthing lyrics over floral backgrounds and no semblance of narrative.
Apocryphal data, the setting was a famous, or infamous, gay night club in London, and while some of the action in the video is surreal, it’s not totally out of the question.
The song itself, a gritty kind of synth pop, a sound that I eventually had different moniker for, but it was all classed as DOR, Dance Oriented Rock in its era.
Mercury Retrograde in Air
Over the ensuing years, I’ve spent a certain amount of meditative moments trying to understand pieces of my own past.
Stop and pick a single music video, and I think that applies to only a certain generation, but phase and pick one video that meant to most.
There certainly are other earworms, and one example that comes to mind, a blue/rock riff, heavy with a signature guitar, and bass line, but that kind of sound? The official video doesn’t do it justice, not to the power of the ear worm itself.
But this isn’t about a band that became a one-hit wonder, doomed by not passing a green screen test, this is about selecting just one music video that changed one’s understanding of our world.
To me, and my faulty memory, I remembered this as highly sexualized content, and while subsequent viewings and current criticism suggests it’s all mostly homosexual, that’s not what I recall, just stylized sexuality.
Long before the lightening rod
of LGBQT and non-binary.
In my mind, my understanding, my works view, even now? It was heavy fetish without being overtly over the top, if that makes sense?
