“A blog about videos”–Jesus, doesn’t this guy know videos are supposed to be fun?
In the first few years of music video, “fun”–I don’t use the quotes sarcastically, but rather to acknowledge that it’s a word that means a million different things to a million different people–did indeed seem to be the guiding principle more often than not. Many of those videos look as hopelessly dated today as the clunkiest silent films. They remind me of Gloria Grahame’s famous quote from The Big Heat as she surveys Glenn Ford’s hotel room: “I like this: early nothing.” Except for me it’s “I hate this: early fun.”
The Devo and XTC videos both predate MTV by a couple of years, a murky time for seeing this stuff. I should stop and do some thorough research, I know, but as I wrote in the entry that launched this blog, the intention here isn’t to write a history of music video. In Toronto, we’d see them on a half-hour show called The New Music, launched in 1979–I turned up on-air for about two seconds once in a crowd shot of Black Flag’s first Toronto show–which in itself was a precursor to MuchMusic (which didn’t debut until 1984), Canada’s own version of MTV. There was NBC’s Friday Night Videos, which I mistakenly thought was a forerunner to MTV; it was, in fact, an attempt to ride shotgun on MTV’s success, first airing in 1983. So you’d see videos wherever you could, unless you couldn’t see them at all. Somewhere–quite likely The New Music–I’m pretty sure I managed to see both of these in 1979 or 1980.
The version of fun on display here is 100% vintage new-wave fun; not late-‘80s hair-metal fun or early-‘90s hip-hop fun or early-‘80s Brit-pop fun, all of which have their own look and their own timestamp. And being new-wave fun, we’ll need those quotation marks; a pair for XTC, four or five pairs for Devo. Both videos are more about making fun of fun than fun itself. But–like the slacker kid in The Simpsons who was so bogged down in ironic detachment that he didn’t even know if he was being ironic anymore–making fun of fun ends up looking a lot like fun anyway.
Devo’s Duty Now for the Future and XTC’s Drums and Wires appeared within a few weeks of each other during the summer of ‘79, but Devo’s LP was released first, so I’ll start with “The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize.” It’s a video where my first thought is one that I often have these days: “I’m not sure you could put that out there today.” The story proper begins with Devo and a crying infant, maybe a year old, in some kind of futuristic-looking control lab; after the boy’s heartbeat is checked with a stethoscope, cut to the band removing the child from a stroller, passing him around gingerly, then launching him airborne. Not that that kind of thing wouldn’t have been frowned upon in 1979, too, but today I think you’d have to have a disclaimer tacked on at the end: “No actual crying, airborne infants were harmed in the making of this video.” When the child–the band looks up at him with curiosity as he soars overhead Superman-like–lands in a tiny inflatable pool, Mark Mothersbaugh is there to snatch him out of the water. It’s never made clear who the baby is or why he’s being catapulted into space–possibly he’s the “surprize” in “got a su-prize from my baby,” and the video is a metaphor for leaving the womb. Which sounds kind of grim and not fun at all.
But: intercut with the baby’s adventures, Devo plays in front of various backdrops–solid blue, jagged electronic flashes, an animated hippo towards the end (as two cockroaches play bongos in its mouth)–and, key to any iteration of new-wave fun, we get Devo’s version of dancing, which amounts to them making fun of the idea of dancing (or at least the idea of them dancing) more than dancing itself. It’s back to those quotation marks again, unless dancing is one instance where quotation marks just don’t apply. Napoleon Dynamite, Ralph Kramden, Ian Curtis, the Bee Girl in the “No Rain” video, Devo here; everybody looks great when they dance, everybody stumbles onto whatever works for them.* One of the Devo guys twitches in one spot as if standing on hot coals, Mothersbaugh sways his left leg and hips ever so slightly, the keyboard player engages in a little minimalist voguing. You may have to look hard to detect any of it, but it’s all there. The highlight might be Mothersbaugh dropping to one knee in a classic soul-singer move, like he’s Jackie Wilson in 1958. (The song’s “ah-ooh” backing vocals make for a perfect fit.)
Absurd, surreal, definitely fun. Devo made other, more famous videos–“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Whip It,” “Jocko Homo”–and they were even making experimental stabs at the form before their debut album. “The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize” will always be my favourite.
Nothing very conceptual hidden in XTC’s “Life Begins at the Hop,” unless you want to argue that they’re countering the idea that life begins in the womb. (They’re not.) By 1979, I’m pretty sure nobody playing new wave music had actually ever been present at a “hop,”** so XTC’s excavation of that term is intriguing. Maybe they had Danny & the Juniors on their mind, maybe American Graffiti, or maybe it just struck them as suitably absurd.
The video opens with Colin Moulding approaching a rather demure-looking, librarian-ish woman who, thoroughly impatient with his aw-shucks, shy-guy routine,*** rips off her glasses, tosses her hair back, and jumps out of her chair. Cut to the band crammed into a cartoonish pink automobile, cruising along in front of the same illustrated building disappearing and reappearing on alternate sides of the frame–a fake backdrop faker than the fakest Hitchcock matte shot–until Andy Partridge walks off-screen with their cartoon automobile, leaving the rest of the band just standing around. After that–with an occasional return to the reassembled car–the hop.
Not the Danny & the Juniors/American Graffiti high-school auditorium hop, with misfit boys lining the walls and teachers on snowball patrol; this one takes place on a mostly empty soundstage, just the band and four women, one for each XTC guy. (Or, if you’d prefer, one XTC guy for each woman.) The space is broken up by a few brightly coloured pipe-like structures, possibly functional but more likely just there as set decoration; the overhead spotlights, functional and presumably there to illuminate the proceedings, are left visible. Sometimes the women commandeer the instruments, but this is 1979, so mostly they’re eye candy, a gyrating blur of fishnet and leopard skin and gold lamé. They’re fantastic–not models, I’m guessing, but friends and girlfriends of the band.
XTC dance too. Favourite: Andy Partridge, who does this kind of runway-marshall-guiding-in-a-plane maneuver with his arms just past the one-minute mark that’s very cool. You can glimpse Partridge dancing in the background with one of the women or another throughout the video–I’m sure it was a disappointment to him that he was expected to pick up his guitar every now and again for effect. Even there, though, a few seconds you won’t forget: when he goes into his staccato solo, the neck of his guitar starts to break off and get progressively smaller until it disappears altogether, a cheeky way to underscore his fake-playing.
Unlike punk, which was–at least in theory–a 100% refutation of nostalgia,**** new wave often adopted a wry embrace of the past, especially of critically overlooked or disreputable genres: surf, bubblegum, rockabilly, etc. Ironic filter aside, there was real love there. I don’t know how much I’d want to ascribe such sentiment to Devo, but you can feel that all through the “Life Begins at the Hop” video. And those same feelings filter down through time. Irony, distance, quotation marks, they all eventually melt away; “Life Begins at the Hop,” especially the joy and abandon of the video, makes me very nostalgic.
And sad–partly the sadness that’s often lurking in the shadows of nostalgia, but mostly a less pleasing kind of sadness, actual sadness. A friend and I were talking about a scene in the French film Regular Lovers where some 1968-era 20-somethings dance to the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow.” They’re not unlike the band and the women in “Life Begins at the Hop”: young, not a trace of self-consciousness, cutting loose in a way that I never really have in my life. And the chance for that has passed–at least the young part. You can decide for yourself whether that part even matters; to me, it makes all the difference in the world.
*Even Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes, sort of.
**But what do I know about England? Colin Moulding: “I like to reminisce, and this one sprang from spending the greater part of my adolescence on a council estate and having the church-hall hop as the only way of getting me rocks off. I go into a trance every time I think of those young socialists meeting in the church hall every Friday night. Well, you have to write about something, haven’t you?”
***Damone, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: “Rat, the shyness routine is really starting to aggravate me.”
****I’m quite sure every punk secretly harbored nostalgic memories of the first Stooges or Velvet Underground record he or she heard.
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