When the M stood for “music” instead of “moronic”.

Back in October, I dedicated a Flashback Friday post to five forgotten music videos from MTV’s glorious 80’s past that stood out for their awesomesauceness, suckiness, just plain weirdness… or all of the above.  I said I would do another post of more lost music videos later on, and here I am today to deliver on that promise!  Here are five more lost 80’s videos that deserve a second look to be applauded, jeered and mocked by the expert applauders, jeerers, and mockers here at The Nest.  Put on a heavy dose of eyeliner (boy or girl, it doesn’t matter) and your best leather outfit… we’re traveling back to the days when MTV actually mattered!

“Sea Of Love” – The Honeydrippers

Under The Sea Of Love…

Anyone who grew up in the 70’s knows who Robert Plant is, the dazed and confused frontman of the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin.  Who would have ever guessed that the same man who was wailing in “Black Dog” would just one decade later form his own band and cover one of the most pussified songs in the history of rock and roll.

That’s the daaaaaaaaaay, I knew you were myyyyy pet!!!

“Sea of Love” was originally a #2 hit for Phil Phillips way back in 1959, over 50 years before he’d go on to win American Idol.  Plant’s new band The Honeydrippers (even the name of the band sounds like some shit a folk group would come up with after smoking organic weed) would remake it in 1985, and here is the schmaltzy video the former wild child of classic rock made for the song…

The video itself, as you would expect for a song that could sure insomnia, is rather uneventful, with the exception of….

I’m just admiring your Big Log, Mr. Plant…

Holy Nightmare Fuel!!!  Where in the hell did Robert dig up that hairy beast playing the marimba, and why did he decide the best choice of outfit for the video shoot would be an all-too revealing speedo!?!?  This song is supposed to put people in a romantic mood, but when you flash images of THIS GUY…

Who wants to help me apply my tanning butter?

…very inappropriately dressed, that’s going to suck the air out of any erogenous balloons that may had begun to inflate faster than the Hindenberg blowing to smithereens.  Thanks Robert Plant, for totally ruining our MTV experience in the mid 80’s by inviting that creepshow along…

“Pop Muzik” – M

Sorry, Mario, but our Princess is in another parking lot.

Who cares if M didn’t know how to spell (which is probably why he gave himself a one letter name), we loved this little piece of New Wave post-disco muzik music.

New York, London, Paris, Munich, Everybody talk about…. Pop Muzik!!!

Like just about every other music video in the prehistoric days before MTV even existed, the artistic and professional qualities in the video for Pop Muzik are a little below standard, even for 1979.  M is dressed up as a disc jockey, grooving along to his little piece of one-hit-wonderdom, accompanied by two department store mannequins dressed in leather who were either brought to life by Jonathan Switcher or Waldo the Magnificent…

Hocus Pocus Alamagocus!!!

But if you think his two female companions look lively, check out the poor chick who sings the backup vocals during the chorus (1:01, 1:42, 2:38).  Ladies and gentlemen, we have officially found the most excited person to ever appear in a music video!!!!

Three times the level of excitement!!! (3X0=0)

“Der Kommissar” – Falco

Rock Me Rainbow Donkey!

Wait a minute, you’re saying… I have the wrong OHW on this song.  After the Fire did “Der Kommissar”, and Falco did “Rock Me Amadeus”.  Those statements are both true, but the fact is that Falco performed “Der Kommissar” first in 1982, before ATF came along and showed him how it should have been done.  As inferior as Falco’s version of the song is to the better known ATF version, the video is even shittier.  Here’s what you can do with 20 douchemarks and an hour of recording time in a Make Your Own Video booth…

The entire video is Falco doing the running man in front of a green screen with police cars “chasing him” in the background.  Oh sure, he stops every once in a while and tries to act cool… and by trying, I mean, failing absolutely miserably…

No caption I could possibly come up does a better job of mocking Falco than this still from the video…

By the time this travesty is over, it’s pretty obvious the police are pursuing him for making such a criminally pathetic video.  At least if he would have invited C.K. Hope along to dance on the police cars, it could have salvaged this absolute dreck.  But we can forgive Falco this early lapse of judgment, as he did totally nail it four years later in Rock Me Amadeus.  A lesson to all of us out there that no matter how much we may suck, we could someday still end up on top of the world after all… or at least in the annals of music video history.

“Shiny Shiny” – Haysi Fantayzee

And Johnny Depp thought he was being original…

Haysi Fantayzee was but a blip on the New Wave radar, and their lone song of any importance “Shiny Shiny” was even more insignificant as far as the music charts went, peaking at #74.  But this was 1983, and MTV would play just about anything that had music in it, so the band’s song got some airplay.  Here it is for your enjoyment…

Once you get past the freakily dressed duo of Jeremy Healy and Kate Garner who front this band, this is actually a rather enjoyable song to listen to.  However this video’s main legacy to the music video industry was in defining the important role of the video vixen… dressing provocatively, shaking the ass, and giving the video the sex appeal that the lead singer only wishes they could.   And no woman now, then, or in the future will ever out-vixen the performance Kate Garner gave in this forgotten 220 seconds of pure MTV gold.

Suck it, Tawny Kitaen!

“No Money Down” – Lou Reed

Who wants to take a walk on the wild side?

Finally, we have a video I wanted to include in my first installment of the MTV Classic series, but had to scratch because at the time there was no clip of the video on YouTube for me to embed here.  The strange thing is, just nine days after I posted that first series of videos, legendary singer and songwriter Lou Reed passed away.  Apparently, that was what it took for whatever entity owns Lou’s schtuff to get this damn video for everyone out there to enjoy on YouTube, as Reed’s Vevo account just uploaded “No Money Down” back in November.

Now, as you watch this video, you’ll quickly see why it is strange, but in a “meh” kind of way.  In fact, if it doesn’t particularly interest you, you might watch the first 30 seconds to a minute of it and say to yourself, “OK, so it’s a robotic head swiveling around and lip synching to the song… big deal…”

And that’s all you’d think if you got bored too easily and only saw the first 90 seconds of the video.  At the 1:34 mark, though, things start getting interesting…. and by interesting, I mean COMPLETELY FUCKING CREEPY AS SHIT!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As if the animatronic head wasn’t bad enough, the entire last half of the video is two hands reaching up from below to rip every piece of fake flesh off the Reed mockup bit by bit!  What in the name of diabolical horror was whoever came up with this idea huffing!?!?!?

The song didn’t even chart when it was released in 1986…. but the video for it will go down in history as by far the creepiest fucking music video ever made…

And that is saying something….

Well, that’s all for this edition of the good, the bad, and the just plain fucked up from the good old days of MTV.  I’ll do this again in the future and dig up five more videos that need one last look before we bury them in the litter box of time once again.  Until then….

DUN, da DUN, da DUN, da DUN!