When we were spoon-fed imagery of an artist or video director’s choosing, our vivid imaginations were forever stuck replaying the same infelicitous mental pictures whenever we heard said song. It’s impossible to hear “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and not see ninjas.
As Valerie Perrine told a then-Bruce Jenner in the prophetically named Village People movie "Can’t Stop the Music," “This is the Eighties, doll, you're gonna see many things you've never seen before." And you’re gonna wish you hadn’t!
1980: “Into the Night” by Benny Mardones
Bereft of music videos in 1956, we were spared the sight of Chuck Berry pushing 30 and lusting after a “Sweet Little Sixteen” year-old dancing on American Bandstand. But this cringey Benny Mardones video is what it would’ve been like seeing a promotional clip of ol’ Chuck ogling teenage girls behind the two-way bathroom mirrors at Berry Park. Mardones, a 40-year-old greaseball in new wave clothes and more eyeliner than J.D. Vance, figures his age-inappropriate clothes will make it all right to visit this teenage queen at her home. He is greeted at the front door by her considerably younger-looking Dad, who mouths the first words of this song: “She’s just 16 years old, leave her alone!” So what does Mardones do? He rolls his eyes, peeps into her window, harasses her from a payphone, and finally spirits her away on a magic carpet, which they can fly over the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and Wallkill, New York, where they print The Watchtower. Maybe there’s some legal loophole that says it isn’t statutory rape if you do it above 1,250 feet in the sky on remnant carpeting.1981: “Private Eyes” by Daryl Hall and John Oates
MTV didn’t exist in 1980, and few outlets played promo clips before Music Television’s premiere on August 1, 1981. But Hall and Oates haul ass, putting several cheapo videos into production where the duo and their band are all lined up in size place and perform as if they are being viewed from an apartment door keyhole. “Private Eyes” is practically a shot-for-shot recreation of the previous “You Make My Dreams Come True” clip, this time with H&O wearing trench coats. Was zooming in with a magnifying glass not in the budget?1982: “Heart Attack” by Olivia Newton-John
Earlier in the year, ONJ had great success with “Physical,” which she insisted was about physical fitness and not s-e-x, thank you. It stands to reason that the same pure as snow Sandy Dumbrowski from Grease didn’t read any sexual connotations in “Heart Attack” either and took this as a serious look at coronary care. Here she’s having a cardiac arrest, inducing a bad dream where a little girl traps her in a giant bird cage, and a dressed-in-black Olivia leads virgin-in-white Olivia off a cliff. In other words, it’s just like Grease if you swap out the little girl for Danny Zuko and the cliff for The Shake Shack. Two years into MTV, and the budgets for music videos are still minuscule. This set looks like someone was trying to recreate Superman’s Fortress of Solitude using Christmas tinsel and ripped-up dry cleaner bags. And lightning bolts that look like they were lifted from an Ultra Brite commercial. With Advanced Whitening, of course.1983: “Lick It Up” by Kiss
In the summer of 1983, Kiss decided to drop its trademark makeup for the same reason that crazy street people drop their drawers: to get attention. And it worked, as this album went gold, where the last three had not bothered the RIAA. For Paul Stanley, whose Starchild persona was an overly prissy rock star, this change of cosmetic policy was a lateral move. But for Gene “Bat Lizard” Simmons, it was as if his face, when not exercising tongue propulsion, was permanently stuck somewhere between Tor Johnson and Magilla Gorilla.Like one of the more hair-conditioned gangs in The Warriors, Kiss trudge through a post-apocalyptic urban landscape where homeless supermodels are reduced to cleaning their trendy threads using open fire hydrants and manhole covers for washboards. They invite the band to be decadent and drink out of what looks like Red Cross plasma canisters. And what you might expect in a Kiss backstage rider to see if anyone’s paying attention, one model offers Simmons a leaf of lettuce (these are models after all). From there, Kiss performs a concert amid the city ruins. Simmons, unable to stop sticking out his tongue in this strange new world with no access to clown white makeup, mansplains what licking looks like. The women’s reaction is undocumented. While the “Lick It Up” single didn’t crack the Top 50, this Kiss-toric video serves as a Hair Farmer’s Almanac for future Aqua Net abusers to follow.
1984: “Rock Me Tonite” by Billy Squier
Need a fast-acting career-killing video that does the job in seconds? Follow in Billy Squier’s ill-advised steps:00:00 - 00:46 — First, make sure you’re wearing lotsa pink pastels, then start snapping your fingers, spinning and preening in the mirror until you’ve convinced everyone you dance as well as Elaine Benes. Then do a variation of jazz hands that looks like you’re trying to fling a booger off your fingers.
00:50 - 01:01 — Crawl across the floor, roll over on your back, thrust your crotch skyward and make a human tent of yourself! Make sure you tell the cameraman to freeze on you in this position!
01:13 - 01:23 — Your instinct for self-preservation may kick in by now, but Billy continues pointing, skipping and ripping his shirt! And we haven't even gotten to the stripper pole yet. No more calls, please! We have our career-killing video winner. Not even Richard Simmons trying out for Gypsy could make homophobes this uneasy. Remember that town that outlawed dancing in Footloose? Maybe they were onto something.
1985: “We Built This City” by Starship
It’s only natural that the ditty GQ Magazine named “the most detested song in human history” should also have one of the worst-ever rock videos. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics were originally written about Los Angeles, but this video jumps over to San Francisco, Cleveland, New York and Las Vegas as if no one wants to accept Starship as its sole architect. Compared to Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick’s wide-eyed overselling of the song, we also see passive listeners staring out at nothing, only showing signs of life when a pair of giant red dice threatens to roll over them. A protest song of sorts, “We Built This City” was meant to be an attack on faceless corporate rock (“Someone’s always playing corporation games/Who cares they’re always changing corporation names”), but it backfires because it’s hard thinking of corporate rockers always changing names and not think of Starship, begat from Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship. When Grace Slick became the last original member of all three bands to defect, she joined the reconstructed Airplane, who really blew a moment by not simply calling themselves The Jeffersons.1986: “Invisible Touch” by Genesis
Everyone has their own jumping off point where they realized we’d seen enough of Phil Collins and he had to be stopped. For many, it was Live Aid where he traveled on the Concorde across the Atlantic so he could be annoying on two continents in one day. For me, it was this song and its accompanying video. Genesis had played at being lovable mop tops before on 45 picture sleeves for “Paperlate” (recreating The Beatles' "Twist and Shout" EP leap into mid-air pose) and “Land of Confusion” (Genesis’ Spitting Image puppet heads posing ala With the Beatles).When Genesis tries to be cheeky and fun like the Beatles in a music video, it quickly becomes apparent that Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks combined don’t even register one personality. So Phil tries to be all four cheeky Fabs at once, singing into his drumsticks, pretending to flash under his overcoat, faking semaphore signals, and mugging for the camera at 45-degree angles. If only someone had sat Phil down and yelled into his drumsticks, “Please. Stop. It.” With a never-ending cycle of Genesis and solo singles unbroken by, I dunno, a vacation, it got so that even Collins confessed that he was sick of himself. So reviled was his nice guy image after this video that when someone starts a rumor that he was inspired to write “In the Air Tonight” after refusing to help a drowning man, it feels like a refreshing upgrade.
