In my last post, I mentioned some music videos from the 80s that seem to knock around in my consciousness and occasionally come to the fore. In particular, I mentioned Rock It by Herbie Hancock, Miami Vice (Theme) by Jan Hammer, and Atomic Dog by George Clinton. I could only find something for Rock It. I'll keep digging around for the other two.
It's kind of odd for me to be making this post about Rock It by Herbie Hancock in the sense that I'm not particularly a fan of music from the 1980s, nor a fan of electronic music, nor a fan of jazz. So, I guess it's mostly about how creative the music video is for the song, and how the song strikes me as funky and cool. I had never even heard of Herbie Hancock until I first saw this video way back in the 1980s, but I eventually learned about his great talent and fabulous career in jazz before making this kind of a novelty hit for himself. I'm sure that at the time, an older person who already knew of and appreciated Herbie Hancock would laugh at hearing someone of my age at the time, like 10 or 11 years old, talk about this strange video with robots in it by "some guy" named Herbie Hancock.
Maybe it was a deliberate move on his part to try and reach a (most likely) younger and unacquainted crowd with this song and video than his usual audience. It is definitely a smart move in both an artistic and financial sense for an artist to try something new once in awhile to reach a different audience. It certainly worked in my case.
So, you know by now, from looking at some of my previous posts that I'm a Beatles fan, but here's a bit of twist in that regard, a post about an offspring of a Beatle, namely Julian Lennon.
I definitely remember when Julian Lennon was a big splash in the early 1980s. I was in the 6th grade, or maybe in junior high school, and knew enough about the Beatles to see how the way Julian Lennon's look and voice and music at the time was of very reminiscent of his father. Not to be cynical but I suspect that this was a very calculating move by his record company and producers and agents and all to present him this way. This angle definitely helped him when he first came out, at least to me being a Beatles fan, but maybe it ended up hurting him in the long run, I don't know. His first album was a pretty big hit, certainly in the realm of MTV, but for various reasons, things dropped off after that in terms of the mainstream music press. He is definitely a talented musician in his own right, and still making music, but it's undoubtedly tough to be appreciated without comparisons when your dad was a Beatle.
I saw something about Julian Lennon somewhere recently and thought of this video with him, running around in the snow and the steam engine and all. I didn't really remember the song but I did remember the video, from watching it way back in the early 80s, probably on Friday Nights Videos. Isn't it interesting and funny how the mind works? That reading something about him made me think of this video? This correlation just made me think of something else - the concept of "sticky-ness" that the author Malcom Gladwell writes of in his book The Tipping Point. I guess the memory of the video is somehow stuck in my mind when the subject of Julian Lennon comes up.
So, but let me talk about watching music videos for a bit here. See, my family didn't have cable in the 80s, so without MTV, there weren't many outlets for music videos except for Friday Night Videos on NBC. I used to sleep over at my Nana's apartment on Fridays because she would let me stay up late and watch shows like Miami Vice and such. Aren't grandparents great for letting you do stuff like that??? Sadly, my Nana's passed on, but she's always right in my heart for things like that and so much more.
Other than Friday Night Videos, there was also a local UHF station in the NY area, U68, that played a lot of music videos. There was also some show on the local ABC station on like either on Saturday or Sunday afternoons that played mostly rap and hip hop music videos. Can't remember the name of that show at the moment, but it was pretty good. The two things I remember from it were Herbie Hancock's Rock It video, and less vivdly, the video for Atomic Dog by George Clinton. Those two were really offbeat, so that's probably why I remember them. Think I'll revisit them both in a forthcoming post.
Anyway, let me stop with the history, and present the Julian Lennon music video. The song is Say You're Wrong, and it is very Beatles sounding, and Julian looks very much like his dad. He's wearing some kind of hat that I think his dad wore in the early Beatles days, that looks like a Greek fisherman's cap. This song was a hit, and I actually like it better than the other bigger hit of his, Too Late For Goodbye's, from that time. Surprisingly, YouTube didn't have this video, but fortunately MySpace does. Enjoy.
