Hello and welcome back to picsandportraits.
Over the past couple of months we’ve been looking a lot at ‘80s futurism. We had Sleepcore
dedicated to it. We also recently covered Max Headroom pretty extensively.
Today, I’d like to round this out, in the spirit of Max Headroom, by looking at some
examples of retrofuturism from ‘80s music videos.
Now, these are not videos that were necessarily featured on the Max Headroom Show but they
should give us a good idea of what else was going on with ‘80s futurism in pop culture.
After all, the music video was huge in the ‘80s. MTV launched in 1981 and greatly influenced
youth culture throughout the decade and even beyond.
MTV was a channel that ran music videos, songs synced with visuals, 24 hours a day. These
videos would be introduced to viewers by a VJ, video jockey, similar to a DJ, disc jokey,
on the radio. Visual radio is a pretty good way of describing early MTV.
Pairing music and visuals was nothing new. We’ve looked before at the Fleischer bouncing
ball. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, some promotional films were also made to promote
songs but the music video didn’t really come into its own until the 1980s.
Because of the popularity of MTV, the medium was pushed and grew. Videos could range from
glorified concert performances to elaborate short films, complete with narratives.
Some of the most iconic media to come out of the 1980s were music videos.
Our focus here though is not going to be on the most popular videos, but instead ones
featuring retrofuturism.
Now this is not going to be exhaustive. Some of these videos may explicitly take place
in the future. Others may just feature futuristic aesthetics.
Let’s start with Radio Ga Ga by Queen from 1984. This video should look familiar, it
uses the same theme and even some footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a hugely influential
piece of retrofuturism. We covered it’s complicated history over on Patreon on Futurefilm.
It was originally produced in 1927, though this cut is lost. Certain scenes are missing,
some have been found over the years and restored and the film has been released many different
times, different versions, different edits.
The year Radio Ga Ga was released, producer Giorgio Moroder put together a shorter cut,
with a soundtrack featuring songs by popular musicians of the day, like Pat Benatar, Bonnie
Tyler and even Freddie Mercury, Queen’s frontman.
Queen does something similar here, syncing footage from the film to Radio Ga Ga. There
is also clips wartime family listening to the radio, and the band performing and driving
this great flying car, which is controlled by a microphone. A great little detail.
Music videos don’t always follow the song’s lyrics, but thematically, the audio and visuals
here are a great pairing.
A major theme in Radio Ga Ga is that video was, at the time, replacing radio, which was
once new, the future, just as Metropolis was, but now both are the past. The narrator laments
this, and assures radio that it is still hip, still loved.
You can also see some Metropolis influence in the video for one of my favourite songs,
Billy Idol’s Dancing With Myself, directed by Tobe Hooper, who was mostly known for horror
movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist.
In Dancing With Myself, Idol navigates a post-apocalyptic city, with a kind of an expressionist skyline
filled with mutants, like in The Omega Man, which we also covered on Futurefilm.
Another film, or I guess franchise, that inspired a lot of music videos was the Mad Max films.
Desolate, desert wasteland, following the collapse of society.
Here we are seeing the video for You Got Lucky by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
We have this great futuristic car, which was also used in the Logan’s Run television
series. Nothing else really too exciting here, the band basically just explores a rundown
building, with allusions to their recent past.
There are TVs playing their older videos. We also see a clip of how their world came
to this, a scene from Galactica 1980, some kind of alien attack.
Micheal Jackson is arguably the most well known musician from the 1980s. He was fixture
on MTV and his 1982 album Thriller is still the highest selling album of all time, by
a pretty wide margin.
Before he was the King of Pop, Micheal performed with his brothers as The Jackson 5, later
just the Jacksons, which swapped out brother Jermaine for brother Randy.
In 1980, The Jacksons released their album Triumph, which gave the single Can You Feel
It.
This is our first look at a prestige video. It’s presented like a film with credits
and was produced by Robert Abel and Associates.
Fans of our history of computer animation series should recognise Abel and Associates.
This agency was responsible for some of the earliest computer generated effects in film.
In 1984 they also produced the great Brilliance commercial for the Canned Food Information
Council. The future is canned.
Can You Feel It isn’t explicitly futuristic. This is probably better filed under sci-fi
but there are some great aesthetics here. The Jacksons play these sort of gods that
sprinkle dust onto the world, causing supernatural events. Again, not super futuristic beyond
this rainbow bridge here.
Wayward brother Jermaine Jackson released When the Rain Begins to Fall with Pia Zadora
in 1984. Noticing a theme year. A lot of futurism released in 1984.
Like You Got Lucky, this takes place in a barren wasteland with roaming and feuding
clans. Another take-off of Mad Max.
Also in 1984, the Rush album Grace Under Pressure gave us a series of futuristic videos.
The Body Electric. This is a future where employees are nothing but numbers. Following
a mistake, the employee 1001001, is pursued and eventually caught by guards. Androids
in an android bar over heat, their shock frees 1001001 and the video ends with him escaping.
In terms of innovations, in the Android Bar, there is this really cool futuristic record
player that creates a video orb to play along with the music, which is pretty awesome.
This also makes an appearance in the video from The Enemy Within, which takes place in
the same world.
The following year, they released the animated music film, The Body Electric, which I would
love to look at further on Futuretoons. It looks like there are some interesting designs.
Could be fun.
Onto videos that take place in specific years. I couldn’t find many but a couple do exist.
Rick Springfield’s Human Touch brings us to the distant year of 2016, seen from 1983.
We learn this through an Alexa-like AI known as Sally.
Here, Springfield plays the captain of a ship whose crew has been put into suspended animation.
There is a lot of frivolous technology, lots of lights and buttons. There is a nuclear
attack and the video ends with Springfield resuming suspended animation, only this time
with some company.
The last video we are going to be looking at is Robin Gibb’s Boys Do Fall in Love.
This was also released, again 1984, and looked 200 years into the future, to 2184.
This takes place on a sort of Star Trek space station, and is a lot cleaner, or more stable,
than what we’ve so far.
This future has keypad entry, androids, who act as servants, video mirrors, transporting.
The costumes here are pretty great as well. I love the sunglasses, or the visors.
Physical media still exists, CDs, which is a future I can get behind and yeah. This manages
to stablish quite a bit in under five minutes.
And that’s about it for today.
Again, this was not meant to be exhaustive. I would love to revisit this topic sometime
in the future if the interest is there. The ‘90s and 2000s gave us lots of great examples
so there is no shortage of material.
I’m not an expert. I was barely alive in the ‘80s so feel free to mention any videos
I may have missed in the comments. Also, I’ll also post links to everything we covered in
the description so let me know what you think.
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