Wednesday, July 12, 2006

MUST SEE

I saw this a week back on Brant's blog and just had to show it. For those of you who lived through the 80's (and can remember it, clearly) we must come to terms with fashion and artistic reparations. I think I should be getting a check in the mail for the damage to my psyche.

I think the drummer looks a little like the bass player on "This is Spinal Tap"

Steve Perry looks a bit like my friend Joey. Joey didn't you buy those actual jeans at an auction or on Ebay?

10 comments:

Seth Ward said...

Holy crap they rock. I heard a recording of them live and it was probably one of the best live performances I have heard.

However, this video... how could we have thought this was cool? How I ask?

Keyboard on the wall? AIR KEYBOARD? Group lip-syncing? Did I mention AIR KEYBOARDING?

Bottom line: We can all still like Journey and think this Video is one of the most hilarious, hanus directorial visions of all time. It looks like it was shot and conceptualized by Chip Dynamite and Directed by Rex.

Seth Ward said...

As a matter of fact, it is almost ingeniously bad.

Reijn of the Elfin Muse said...

i am so glad that i was born in the late 80s so i do not remember that time era much at all...but i do remember the early 90s quite well...its not that much of a step up when it comes to clothing.

Anonymous said...

I'm in favor of the idea of 80's fashion reparations. Good one!

operamom said...

that was completely hilareous. the drummer takes the cake. You can hear the spinal tape dialogue in your head.

Susanne said...

I loved Journey! I have to admit I found myself singing along and moving my head (white person style) to this song. Reijn...you make me feel OLD!! You're right though...the 90's styles weren't much of an improvement. Thanks for the memories, Seth!

Joey said...

Yes...it's true. I own three pairs of those amazing jeans, in fact one of them has the cool bandana sewn around it so it never falls off. Those jeans are my rockin'-cool J jeans~! Like inward singing they keep me rockin' full-time!

Chaotic Hammer said...

Seth - This video made me think of a comment you made a little while back about blaming TV for your Attention Deficit Disorder.

You were referring to the cinematic style that has become commonplace -- in fact, it's been commonplace for over fifteen years now, and to many younger people, they may not realize where it came from... so I'll expound a bit (that's what Blog Comments are for, right?)

The short answer is MTV. I know this because I was there. I was watching MTV almost literally the first day it went on the air. After school every day, I'd spend way too many hours in front of the TV, watching this cool new concept of showing a video along with the music.

And in the early days, many of the videos were quite cheesy, a lot like this Journey video. Many others were simply videos of concert footage, and gradually everyone began mixing in more and more artistic flair.

Soon, many videos were actors playing parts spoken of in the songs, or were the musicians acting out parts of the lyrics, or doing things besides just standing on a stage and performing. There were animations mixed in, puppet shows, and lots of other clever, artistic things.

But whatever they were, the dominant style was originally to just show scenes like you would see them if you were sitting in the room at camera level -- from a fairly standard camera angle, for several seconds or more during each separate scene.

Sometime in mid-to-late 80's and early 90's, after a variety of styles and phases in video composition had come and gone, this new style began to dominate -- the same style that still dominates today (though it's in an evolved form today).

Musicians would be filmed in the videos wearing at least four or five different changes of clothing, with at least four or five different backgrounds and settings. The camera would only show brief flashes of each musician in each scene, then the same musician a moment later in different clothing in a new setting, but still singing the song or playing their instruments along with it. Cameras began shooting from different angles, sideways, upside down, deliberately cutting off people's heads from the shot, only showing their hands rubbing together as they sang something deep or contemplative.

I believe that REM's video "Losing My Religion" was one of the first to use the "lens flare", where it looks like the light saturation is overloaded early in a scene, or a flash bulb just went off when the scene starts.

Also, the quality of the videos themselves increased a lot, from looking like something done with a couple of cheap VHS home video cameras, to big-screen cinema quality high-speed videography.

But anyway, my point was that this started on MTV, with the creative minds that were searching for new and different ways to use video as an art form, and gradually bled into all other forms of video and cinema entertainment -- TV shows, commercials, and even movies.

So we still have this today, and most people don't even realize it or think about it because it's been the style for so long. Scenes are only a few seconds long, things happen in quick flashes, things are shown from strange angles, kitsch is a mainstream art form, and as Seth noted, people who grew up with this as the prevalent cinematograpy and videography paradigm have a spastic attention span, and probably don't even know why.

So, anyway, like I said: That's what this Journey video reminded me of -- the way things were before all the changes in video style and techniques took place.

Chaotic Hammer said...

(But wait there's more!)

Because my last comment wasn't long enough, I'm going to ramble on a little more about other things, too.

I don't recall having ever seen Journey in concert, but sometime in the mid-80's, when I was a new Christian, I did go to a Journey concert at the Summit in Houston (it's now the place where Lakewood Church meets) to pass out Christian tracts to people on their way into the concert.

Before you think I'm a buffoon for this, please consider the context. I was a new Christian, full of zeal and eager to tell others about this amazing new thing I'd found in the Lord. And this was also during the period of time when it was largely preached, and widely believed, that "secular" music was inherently evil, completely of the devil, and on top of all that, had secret backwards messages that was brainwashing everyone to worship satan (you know, because the sinful messages in the music were not obvious enough by just playing the songs FORWARD).

So our idea (me and a group of about six or seven friends, I think) was to pass out tracts telling people how to receive Jesus as their Lord, and we were hoping to get a chance just to witness to some people if they decided to stop and talk to us about it (which a few actually did, believe it or not).

So make fun of me if you must, but I just thought I'd share that little bit of my personal history with you all.

operamom said...

oh man, had to watch that again for a good laugh. you are talkin' funny.