Video Mixtape #1

Discord just added support for streaming video into their app.  It comes, really, at the perfect time, being as none of us are particularly allowed to leave the house right now.  I'm on a Discord server that has started up a streaming schedule and I put in for an hour of videos.

This stage of media technology, what I call the "Man with the Flower In His Mouth" stage - this is the only stage where I feel like I have any opportunity.  Because nobody knows how it's supposed to work, which opens up space for weirdos like me who actively want to do things "wrong".

It's a great excuse for me to delve into what I refer to as "the crap mines" - a vast, poorly organized "archive" of strange and interesting stuff - and try to engage with it.  The temptation of hoarding is to bury stuff, not by intention but because you're picking up so much new stuff you never get back around to the old.  Making mixes, blogging, all of these things are, in large part, pretexts to motivate me to get around to processing those things I already knows, things I have in some cases forgotten.  It also ties the two main threads of this blog neatly together, because here we have weird music _and_ strange visual artifacts!

As new as it is, I started with what was off the top of my head.  When there's enough stuff putting together a guiding principle, a theme, is helpful to me, but most of this is terra incognita to me, a lot of if things I didn't know I had and don't know where I got them from.

Brainiac - Vincent Come On Down (Promo VHS): In 1974, the Residents followed up their first LP by recording a record they intended to never release, called "Not Available".  Ths intent was to explore what art would sound like knowing it would never be heard by anyone else.  Things being as they are the record company wound up releasing it over their objections only a couple years later, but since then I have thought of invisible art.

The '90s, I feel, were kind of a golden age for unseen video art.  There was basically no commercial market for buying music videos, but MTV was still a popular broadcast medium.  So if you were a band signed to a label, and after Nirvana lots of bands got signed to labels, there was a budget for videos.  Except that MTV was moving towards reality television already at this point, and even if it was showing videos, the days when they would show any old crap that was sent them for want of material, the days when some bit of zolo-qua-zolo like "Dog Police" could get airplay, were long past.

So I don't think anybody ever saw the video for "Vincent Come On Down".  I lived in Dayton, I was a Brainiac fan at the time, and I had no idea there was a video.  I wonder what happened to Marcelle Karp, Rosanna Herrick, and Michael Perillo, who worked on the video.

Nowadays there are plenty of bands nobody has heard of, it's cheap and easy for anyone to make a video, but the difference is that all of this stuff is now immediately streaming.  Something like Megumi Wata's "Catastrophic" is unknown in the sense that nobody has seen it, but it is as available as damn near anything else, and was from day one.  The central question - and I will get back to this in the context of Dead boots - I ask myself when looking at history is Woodward and Bernstein's central question: What did the President know, and when did he know it?  Except for "the President" substitute out "people", because I'm interested in social history, not Great Man history.  I'm as interested, if not more interested, in the things I could have seen, half-remembered, forgotten, as I am in things that have been "lost".

I'm told they're making a documentary on Brainiac.  I'm told Mark Hamill is a fan.  I got some bootleg DVDs of Brainiac from years ago, ripped somewhere.  I'm not super in touch with that scene.

Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire: No theme, no, but the next song reminded me of this.  A brief shot of Gainsbourg, sleeves unbuttoned, while a laughing woman in a bowl haircut holds the mic near his face and then we are over to Lizzy and her _attitude_.  Descloux was previously known as Rosa Yemen, a no-wave provocateur perhaps inspired by Rosa Luxemburg (and I see that Teen Vogue has a primer on Rosa Luxemburg running in a recent issue - that's certainly extremely on-brand for them).  She went solo with a disco cover of "Fire".  This particular "Fire" was a 1968 single put out by one of the great weirdos of rock music, Arthur Brown, who figured, correctly, that he would be able to score a huge chart hit if he just went on stage and lit his head on fire at every opportunity.  Refreshingly, this was probably the least interesting thing he ever did, but it's true that his other stuff, while fascinatingly esoteric, may perhaps have lacked the immediate visual impact of his breakthrough hit.

Descloux represents a particularly Gallic strain of young woman - something about her that I don't recognize in the young women of any other culture but I see in many young French women.  A certain insouciance in her attitude, the sort that one typically sees only in men in other Western countries.  Short hair, but she still needs to keep pushing it out of her face; it rapidly becomes disheveled.  I will take this over a man with his head on fire most days of the week.

Ruins - Fire: This song was original to Ruins, one of the stranger of the Italo Disco projects.  Ruins, you see, took their name from the song by the avant-garde leftist prog band Henry Cow, and there is therefore a certain apocalyptic Brechtian element to this video as well.  The singer wears a garishly striped suit, though fortunately for him not garishly striped in a manner that messes with the camera.  The transfer is clean and high quality.  The effects employed in the video include some overlaid illustrative images (including, for anyone concerned about NSFW content, brief female nudity) and, during the chorus portions, the same sort of visual effects used in the Film Ventures International versions of films like "Pod People" and "Cave Dwellers" that appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The other member of the band first appears in this segment, wearing a bright yellow DEVO jumpsuit and riding an exercise bicycle.  This evokes for me the "lost" cut scene from the final episode of The Prisoner, in which Number Six passes through a room full of men in wetsuits riding stationary bicycles.  The image maintains a vivid hold on my memory even though I have never seen the sequence in question (and can no longer, indeed, find an Internet cite to confirm that this sequence ever existed!)

Eggroll Performs "No Satisfaction" 1987 on NY Public Access: The phrase "public access" evokes certain associations in US viewers of a certain age.  Public access television came about as a trade-off cable companies made in the "public interest".  In fact, I'm not sure that the "public interest" was necessarily a signficant concern over the battle for "pay TV" - on a propaganda level, messages like the one heard at the beginning of Negativland's "You Must Choose" from on their "Live at the Knitting Factory" appearance seem to my cynical ears to be more driven towards protecting the rights of their networks and their advertisers to profits than the best interests of the public.

But maybe the public interest did have a voice at this time.  I personally would argue that the institution of "public access" did in fact serve the public interest, in providing diverse voices with the opportunity to be heard without having to go through commercial gatekeepers, in providing education and training in video production techniques.  The stereotype of "public access" was that it was amateurish, strange, and done on pitifully low budgets.  This video defies these stereotypes.

A lot of this is down, I think, to where it was made - New York was one of the most important and influential cities in the world when this was made, perhaps _the_ most important and influential city in the world, and the quality of even its cultural ephemera is accordingly on that much higher a level.  This video, "public access" or no, has at least as high production standards as, say, a circa 1987 episode of Doctor Who, and far above the embarrassing "psychedelic" style of '70s Beat Club videos.  There is an unfortunate tendency towards effects that today would be avoided as inducing epilepsy, but certain effects, for instance the double exposure where the guitar is seen to duet with herself, are extremely well done.  The transfer, done by someone whose email address is embedded in the video, is high quality as well, though my copy is 480p and obviously from a VHS.

So I do find this video, which I have no idea where I got, by a band I never heard of, inspirational.  I am particularly taken with the fashion aesthetic evident in the video.  It strikes me as very queer.  I don't know whether it is or whether it isn't, but I'm inspired by it.  The guitarist comes across as a forebear of fellow Berklee grad St. Vincent.  I am also very much taken with the ways in which gender was performed in the '80s.  A lot of that style is most strongly associated with Madonna, but there are a lot of queer people will tell you it wasn't Madonna who was doing it first.  The guitarist is wearing prominent makeup, wearing a skirt and big earrings, but the way she's put together emphasizes the hard lines in her face, her androgyny.  My wife walked into the room while I was watching the video and asked if I was watching Boy George.

The music is definitely extremely high quality as well.  There's a temptation to see someone with a Jheri curl playing a keytar and laugh, but you know what, these people are still cool, cooler than I have ever been.

Magic Sam's Boogie 1969 (live): Some footage of the legendary cult Chicago bluesman Magic Sam from the year of his death, about the only known footage that exists of him performing.  High quality transfer of some well-known footage.  Sort of speaks for itself!

Betty Hutton - "Murder" He Says: Despite being primarily an actor and not a singer, Hutton is probably the singer most associated with this '40s musical number.  It's not hard to see why.  She tears into it with complete gusto, and if the emcee's summary of her performance is kind of sexist in its phrasing, the sentiment itself is pretty on-target.  These days the song is probably best known by hipsters and Tori Amos fans.  I like it because here's some evidence that there was life before Elvis!  Women were allowed to have personality traits other than "fuckable"! (although "fuckable" apparently remained a prerequisite.)

Megumi Wata - Catastrophic: I just sort of liked the contrast here.  And I didn't want to leave the "present day" (or near enough) out of this entirely.  So we cut from a black and white film of a very animated, boisterous lady to, some seventy years later, a somewhat washed-out black and white closeup of a young woman wearing a hoodie in a bar, staring blankly at the camera.  We don't necessarily think of the visual style of the present day as being quiet or low-key, but this video is the most understated part of the hour.  Maybe that's why nobody has apparently seen it.  I came across it randomly on a message board in 2015.  I don't know from J-pop.  For all I knew it was enormously popular.  It wasn't, apparently.  Haven't heard of Wata since.  Song's been stuck in my head, video's been stuck in my head, all this time.  A quiet, low-key young woman in combat boots and a T-shirt dress reading "BIG WOOD".  A young man doing the robot in jeans, a Yankees cap, and a T-shirt advertising a vintage sneaker store.  Musette and marimba sounds, maybe the actual instruments, maybe keyboard patches.  Lots of text I can't read.

And then at the key change at the end it shifts into color, and this somehow makes the overall vibe more downbeat.  Instead of smiling and dancing on the street she's back in the hazy, dimly lit bar from the beginning, looking extremely sad.  Cut to hiss and record company logo.

Brian Eno - Seven Deadly Finns: I can't remember where this is from - Dutch television perhaps?  Eno shot here with an aerial zoom, quietly fabulous, tastefully catty, lip-syncing his double-entendres and overdubbed yodeling.  It's definitely got that colour separation overlay look to it, just like the Beat Club used, but it's so much more tasteful; just him on a blue screen floor, through which we see dozens of copies of Eno honeycombed through a fly's eye.  Not terribly unique except that it's a song that's easy to forget, not being on an album, and because Eno solo didn't do a lot of pop TV shows.

The Bee Gees - Indian Gin and Whisky Dry: Right, now we can get back to the WEIRD STUFF.  In this case a clip from a German TV special from about 1968 the Bee Gees made for their "Idea" LP.  I did a deep dive through the Bee Gees' catalog, accompanied by a song-by-song message board thread, last year, and this bit stuck with me.  First off the very charming song, but most definitely the utterly absurd video as well.  This is very much in the style of '60s promo videos, which tended to be on the "whimsical", not to say "wacky" side.  Third-generation duplicates of "A Hard Day's Night", designed to show pop stars as fun-loving young lads with puckish senses of humour... but somehow turning out weirder than the Beatles.  The Beatles, mind, were plenty weird, but there's something to be said for a hastily shot video from some Belgian TV studios of Roger Waters, shot from an extremely unflattering angle, terribly lip-syncing the insane flop single that was the most recent thing their erstwhile frontman released with the band, or even the band in happier times denuding a mannequin (the sort which is difficult to look at without imagining their fingers falling off to reveal a gun - PENG!) in reverse.

And the Bee Gees were the perfect band for this particular sort of tuneful, unforced absurdity.  One never gets the sense that they were _trying_ to be surrealists, not like the Monkees cavorting around in Victor Mature's hair, just that they weren't particularly adept at writing tunes that made any logical sense whatsoever.  Indian Gin and Whisky Dry isn't even one of their weirder lyrics, but the video, which shows the five members of the band popping up and down out of cocktail glasses for two minutes - if I were to see a bootleg edit of Un Chien Andalou with this sequence edited in I'd probably like the Un Chien Andalou even more than I do!

On top of that the film transfer I have is not particularly good, having the look of something done on decent enough (probably 16 mm) film though with clumsy sfx, very abrupt and visible edits, then transferred up to 50 FPS video for television broadcast, then knocked back down to 24 FPS for online streaming, and with some identifying chyrons stuck on top of the image to boot.  What's left is blurry, indistinct and indistinguishable little model men, colour drained to the point where one isn't sure if all of them are wearing trousers.  And then there's the poor guy second from right standing with his arms folded, without even an instrument to mime playing badly.  The video could possibly stand to accrete more artifacts, but then you'd have a hard time passing it off as "hi def".

Lazarus Sin - "Blood For Mercy" on Midnight Metal with Al Scott: This is the sort of thing one more expects from public access TV.  Having said that this particular video isn't, in fact, public access... it is, however, definitely, unquestionably, late-night local television, brought to you from the heart of the Willamette Valley.  This is the sort of show "Wayne's World" was made to parody.  Fortunately, though, this is actually pretty funny!

Anyway, the video, although I believe that it is as close as one gets to an "official" transfer, is clearly a multi-generation videotape.  I don't have an exact year, but it's apparently sometime in the late '80s - the "Intracranial Mass" (see?  these guys were FUNNY for metalheads!) tape is said to have been released in '88, so this probably isn't much later than '89.  The ad for Record Garden prominently features metal CDs, so probably not too much earlier either!

What I love about this video is that it gives you a real taste of Eugene, and of the unglamorous realities of being a working metal band in the '80s.  Lead singer Joseph Tierney is a true metalhead, but he's also, you know, working out of Eugene, perhaps the old hippie capital of the Pacific Northwest, and therefore he is, in fact, wearing yoga pants in the video for "Blood For Mercy", for the same reason all the bands from farther north in the Pac NW wore flannel - it was available and cheap!  He pairs the look with a cutoff T-shirt reading "HONK IF YOU ARE JESUS" in a Fraktur typeface.  He doesn't have the body to wear a cutoff T-shirt (not body shaming; most of us don't), but he also knows this and isn't showing off any midriff.  Shots of them performing (clearly from two sessions, as Tierney is wearing different clothes and no mirror shades in the close-up shots) are intercut with various crude animations of barely recognizable '80s political figures... this might be what accounts for Tierney's claim (to which Al Scott (a champion manspreader, incidentally; I'd hate to sit next to him on public transit) can't suppress an incredulous laugh) that editing the video took "30 hours".

Rodion GA - Stele si lumini: Ah, yes.  Who doesn't know the Romanian synth wizard Rodion GA?

Well, yes, most of us, this is true.  Nevertheless, here they are performing on Romanian television at some nebulous, ill-defined '70s-'80s juncture.  From what I've heard of the Conducator - much of which is strongly related to the Christmas spirit - I'm not certain how these guys got on television in Ceaucescu's Romania, but clearly whoever was responsible for this performance took to heart the principle of control what you can control and let the rest go.  So yes, Rodion GA are playing a fairly wild synth-based rock number, but here's the important thing, the entire band are wearing nice professional suits, and so are the entire audience of clean-cut young men and women, who have come dressed for a night of good old fashioned ballroom dancing.

They're not, mind you.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say they're cavorting in a psychedelic frenzy, but they're having a rather more unstructured time of it than ballroom dancing would allow for.  Yes, the decor of the hall is pretty disco, but this being an Iron Curtain regime the design is Brutalist Disco, a disco as if it had been designed by Le Corbusier ("If Le Corbusier Designed Discos" is one of my favorite Minutemen songs).  Pulsing lights, wavy jagged lines, stark black and white... I could think of worse places for a heavy synth-rock group to be playing.  And always the same transition between shots, the cameraman being even more fond of the snaking squares fade than Lucas was of the wipe.  This being from a digital rebroadcast (so many stations just love to shove a colour logo on top of a B&W picture, and I hate it so much) there's a fantastic total digital breakdown/collapse right at the end of the piece.  Completely serendipitous.  Fits the mood perfectly!

Angel Witch - "rund" TV show, DDR, 1981: Let's dawdle a while behind the Iron Curtain while we can, shall we?  Communism in East Germany had particular challenges, especially relating to the media.  The problem here was that the East German people could, and did, watch West German media on a regular basis.  This was officially banned, but Honecker had no way of enforcing this regulation, and laws one can't enforce are worse than useless - they undermine the legitimacy of the regime.  All of Germany came to mock the far corners of East Germany where West German broadcasts didn't reach - "Tal der Ahnungslosen", they called the regions.  Valley of the Clueless.

So at some point apparently someone in the DDR decided to try the "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" approach and lure Western rock bands over to play.  What they got was the second-tier (though still, mind, extremely good) NWOBHM group Angel Witch.  I'm not sure what the desired effect was, but if they were trying to draw out potential "subversives" by trying to convince any such people that literally half their neighbors weren't on the payroll of the fucking Stasi, I'm guessing it didn't work.

In any event, we're left with this document, which is a prime example of the sort of degraded, multiple-generation copies that we used to content ourselves with back in the '80s and '90s.  How many generations?  At a guess I'd say at least seven - that's about the point at which you lose all colour from the signal.  This was originally broadcast in colour, yes, and possibly the master still exists, but who even knows where the DDR television archives are?  Who wants to watch decades of dull Communist propaganda just to try and find Angel Witch lip-syncing on TV?  I know "Ostalgie" was a thing for a while, but let's be real, most Communist propaganda was dull, dull, dull!

No, better to remember it this way, occasional (but no more) failures of tracking, the studio lights regularly causing blinding flashes of light to ricochet off the guitars, little discernable of the band beyond their truly beautifully coiffed hair.

Look at that list of crew at the end of the video.  How many of them do you think worked for the Stasi?

Emilia - Satan in Love: I'm not sure if this is the original version of "Satan in Love" or a Finnish-language cover version.  I know I have two versions of this tune sitting around.  This is again clearly from a rebroadcast - superimposed logo again - and the artifacts here are really all digital.  This bears all the particular hallmarks of overcompression - dodgy brightness gradients and pixellation on things like the flickering flames - and I imagine in a few decades I'll be nostalgic for this sort of thing rather than just annoyed.

Instead let's focus on Emilia.  I don't know Finnish, but I know the title of the song and I can get pretty well the message Emilia is trying to convey, smoldering in gold lame culottes (Gold lame culottes?  You know what, fine, we'll go with it) over a steady pulse of flatulent analog synths and sinuous bass.  Pure sex, particularly when the camera switches to show her in silhouette like a James Bond movie title or something.  And then the lighting that makes it look like there's a fast food heat lamp directed at her inner thighs.  Well, that's one way to get hot, I guess.

During the second verse she tries to vamp her way down the stairs, but after nearly tripping and falling on her face decides to just crawl around instead.  Good plan.  Being sexy isn't worth a faceplant.

The Moments - Be Sure My Love: Is this dodgy?  I don't know if it's dodgy.  The Moments are part of the Japanese scene which really admires the sound of the doo-wop groups of the '50s, which fair enough, it's a great sound and they do a great job recreating it.  Of course, this being video, they're also enamored with the look.  See, one of the artifacts from when, precisely, Japan picked up on American culture is that a lot of American culture was pretty fucking racist.  These guys clearly love doo-wop, the harmonies, the finger-snaps, the quality old mikes (I don't know if they work or if they're just there for show, because in the video we're hearing them through a regular old crappy room mike), the wide orange lapels that make you look kind of like Dracula, the impeccably shined shoes, the ridiculously oversized suits, the pompadour, the conk... when does this start becoming racial stereotyping?  I don't know.  It's not my place to say.  Great musical performance, though.