I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution / Rob Tannenbaum, Craig Marks

A Look Inside I Want My MTV

In their 2011 book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, authors Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum revisit the “golden age” of music videos, from 1981 to 1992, based on interviews with more than 400 people. As they learned, sometimes bad videos happen to great songs. Here are ten examples.

Psychedelic Furs, "Pretty in Pink" (1984; 1986)
One of the great songs of the ‘80s, but as a video, it’s a two-time dud. The original video, from 1981, was too dreary and claustrophobic to capitalize on MTV’s emerging Anglophilia. Five years later, a new version, rerecorded and re-filmed for the John Hughes movie of the same name, lacked the snarl of the original; Andie, Blaine and Ducky should never have even bothered.

Fleetwood Mac, “Hold Me” (1982)"
Making a video in the desert is sweaty and difficult, especially with a band that can’t stand one another: “It was so hot, and we weren’t getting along,” Stevie Nicks recalls. “Hold Me” is like a sun-baked hallucination, with sand dunes, guitars, Magritte paintings, Nicks in five-inch platform heels, and an obligatory, early-1980s slow-motion shot of breaking glass. Director Steve Barron: “That wasn’t a good video.” Producer Simon Fields: “John McVie was drunk and tried to punch me. It was a [expletive] nightmare, a horrendous day in the desert.”

Rick James, "Super Freak" (1982)
Not long after MTV launched with a nearly all-white playlist, Rick James decried the network as “racist,” charging that MTV’s segregated programming was “taking black people back 400 years.” James was enraged that MTV refused to air “Super Freak”; in fairness to the network, this gully video, starring James and a multiracial array of hot messes in streetwalker garb, was more akin to Pootie Tang than, say, “Billie Jean.” Carolyn Baker, who was MTV's director of acquisitions, says, "As a black woman, I did not want that representing my people as the first black video on MTV."

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message” (1982)
In the concluding scene, two cops arrest Flash and his band mates, possibly for the crime of making this awful video. The lyrics describe and denounce the dangers of urban poverty – so why are these rappers dressed like low-budget Michael Jacksons? “An immortal song, but the video was pure ghetto,” says Def Jam executive Bill Adler. “Some of the earliest rap videos were terrible.”

Bruce Springsteen, "Dancing in the Dark" (1984)
Springsteen is adorably dorky in his first-ever video appearance, no more so than during his infamous new-wave dance-off with audience plant Courtney “Monica Geller” Cox. Directed by famed filmmaker Brian DePalma, “Dancing in the Dark” was catnip to MTV’s teen demo (girls in particular), but Springsteen's longtime manager, Jon Landau, says the singer had "mixed feelings" about the video: "It broadened Bruce's appeal, but the whole thing was slick and high gloss. Not a typical Bruce Springsteen thing."

Billy Squier, “Rock Me Tonite” (1984)
There are only two videos which merit their own chapters in “I Want My MTV,” and this is one. Squier was a hard-rock superstar before he released this video, which he describes as “diabolical.” Here’s the plot: Squier wakes up in a bed of silk sheets, puts on white drawstring pants, skips around his bedroom, grinds on the floor, rips off his t-shirt, then puts on a pink tank top, and collapses back on his silk sheets. Squier blames this video for ending his reign on the rock charts.

U2, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” (1984)
There are three different video versions of U2’s tribute to Martin Luther King Jr., and none did any favors to the song. The second was shot by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, and in his defense, he directed it hurriedly, in the basement of a hotel near Heathrow Airport, before U2 flew to Japan. He uses closeups of the band’s faces, mostly in profile and shadowed, until the end, when Bono frenetically shakes his grand mullet. Corbijn recalls that when the band’s manager saw the video, “he swore that I would never be allowed near U2 again with a film camera.”

Prince, "Raspberry Beret" (1985)
For an artist at his zenith in the ‘80s, Prince never quite figured out music videos. “Raspberry Beret” is the most egregious example of Prince-the-control-freak taking a perfectly bad idea--let’s hire two animators to work around the clock on a tale about a girl in a hat!--and making it worse, by taking the twee animation and clumsily combining it with performance footage. Producer Simon Fields: "Prince would mess with directors. He’d give them the impression that they’d be in charge of the video, then halfway through he’d go, 'Thank you,' take what he liked, and edit it himself." Much respect to his Liza Minnelli hairdo, however.

Aretha Franklin, “Freeway of Love” (1985)
In this comeback hit for the Queen of Soul, it’s difficult to decide which is the worst part of the video. Is it the performance footage, where Franklin and her band grin like someone’s pointing a gun at them? The literally-translated lyrics, which show a pink Cadillac when Aretha sings “Pink Cadillac,” and a traffic jam when she sings “city traffic’s moving way too slow”? Or is it the dance sequences, which seem to have been choreographed by Benny Hill? Let’s say each.

Pixies, "Velouria" (1990)
Not even Dave Kendall could like this one. In need of a last-minute video for the U.K.’s influential Top of the Pops countdown show, the band--not exactly telegenic on its best day--is filmed in suuuuuper sloooowwwww moooooooootion running through a quarry. Any slower and they’d be time traveling. One camera. One shot. That’s it. Band. Running. Quarry.

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