I don’t know about you, but for me, the moment of truth about music videos came when I first saw Pat Benatar’s sleazoid epic of society’s childom, “Love Is A Battlefield.” I mean, here was the first video I’d seen in which the song meant little, if anything, to the video. Not that it’s a bad song—it isn’t—but because somewhere in the planning stages, the “creators” of this film (made, after all, to promote the song) saw that song as little more than soundtrack material, with little (outside of the title, perhaps) to draw from for their mini-drama. In other words, the song’s basic female love/pain/teens /angst turf, turf that Ms. Benatar has, for some time now, held reign over (Lesley Gore, where are you now that we really need you?), was apparently deemed not “high concept” enough to build on.

So what did we get for our four minutes and change? First of all, we got a bona fide “prologue” depicting life in dead-as-doornails suburbia, with Pat the “confused girl” aching to “do her own thing,” and getting run out of the house for her troubles. What then follows is the pathetic tale of a young lass who hits the big town with big dreams, only to become a hapless street urchin, ultimately falling into the sweaty clutches of the local Third World pimp (gold tooth and all) and turning into your basic Minnesota Strip teen runaway turned you-know-what. Things remain suitably disgusting until the girls in the office, obviously upset about the lack of coffee breaks in their work schedule, improvise a ritualistic dance of the oppressed, throw a drink or two in ye pimp’s puss, and march out triumphantly onto Manhattan’s always hope-filled Fourteenth Street. From there it’s off to huggy kissy bye-bye land by the defunct part of the West Side Highway and, presumably, a new start—which, for Our Miss Patty, means a bus ticket back to the “safety” of hearth and home. Goodbye, New York, hello, East Orange, and all that.

Now, besides some all-purpose bad vibes and a rather crude interpretation of the song’s title line (being a hooker is like being in the infantry?), just what does the visual part of the “Love Is A Battlefield” video have to do with the “Love Is A Battlefield” song? Right; nada. And so, between the utter irrelevance of sound to sight, a prologue that comes complete with extracurricular “dialogue” (no dad yelling in the song), much fancy footwork by a crackerjack film editor to cover up the fact that, outside of a bizarre upper torso shimmy, Benatar cannot dance one bit, and a locale that led me to realize, on about the fourth viewing, that they’d been filming all this wretched stuff right near the most angelic natural foods store I’ve been going to for years, well, it started to become quite clear to me that just about anything I could think of in regard to this video had absolutely nothing to do with anything but video itself. So much so that, as I watched the girls going through the gyrations of their low-life version of “Swan Lake,” I started thinking about the dancing in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” leading to the conclusion that it was probably the same choreographer, and, moreover, that the whole decidedly “urban” atmosphere of “Love Is A Battlefield” was also rather like “Beat It,” so it was probably the same director as well. That I subsequently learned that I was right on both counts led me to the very strange realization that I had, finally, been locked into video on its own weird terms; that, bordered by the four sides of the small screen, video had actually succeeded in creating its own specialized universe, an insulated world where videos could, if they so desired, relate to nothing else but other films, other TV, or (even worse) other videos. So, with a uniquely peculiar set of reference points set into place, video has indeed— irrevocably, it would seem—“come of age,” a vast cultural wasteland all its own. Hence this column.

Actually, speaking of “Beat It” and of video starting to feed off of itself reminds Us that our favorite video for this month comes by way of the irrepressible lampooner “Weird” A1 Yankovic. Yankovic, already moderately famous for such instant noodnickiana as “My Bologna” and “Another One Rides The Bus,” has set down his trusty accordian long enough to go to the head of the class with the mind-boggling “Eat It” parody. The lyrical re-write is hysterical enough; the video borders on good old Mad magazine-styled genius. “Eat It” spoofs the entire “Beat It” video, from the guys at the bar (here, when the guy pulls the girl’s hair back, her head falls off) to the street gangs (the white kids are late for the rumble ’cause they had to wait for the bus) to the big battle itself, which finds the two gang leaders facing off with knife and fork to see who’ll survive to eat the prize chicken. Enter Al, peacemaker and gourmand, to toss a little Accent around and keep the neighborhood from being fowled up (sorry, couldn’t resist) by a mass gas attack. So give that boy some papaya enzymes, on us. Think he knows “Lady Of Spain”?

The Rolling Stones... They used to be good, they used to be hip, they usecj to be sexy. That was 20 years ago. Today, in the harsh light of the ’80s, none out of three ain’t good. To “beef’ up the video for the rather lukewarm tune “She Was Hot,” the Stones utilized the epidermal talents of Anita Morris, the sexpot redhead from the Broadway show Nine. Here, she simulates all manner of sexual innuendo (as Groucho Marx once almost said: “Love goes out the door when lust flies innuendo”) with not only all five Stones (yes, even Bill) but everyone else within T & A range. We can hear the MTV rap now: a funny, satirical look at social mores by those “controversial” bad boys, the Stones. And we thought “Undercover Of The Night” was a laff riot!

SNAP SHOTS:

Best Plot Related To Subject Matter: UB40’s “Red Red Wine”—15 years ago, Tom Courtenay would have played the lead role. Besides, this is the first song in five years that you can hum “Guantanamera” to... Best Plot Not Related To Subject Matter: Icehouse’s “Hey Little Girl”—sounds just like Roxy Music, looks like Roxy Music... Immediate Death Not Good Enough: Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga”—Fritz Lang escaped the Nazis for this?.. .Hey, Dig Those Crazy Ingmar Bergman Moves Dept.: Eurythmics, “Here Comes The Rain Again”—seriously, though (very seriously), if Dave Stewart is Max Von Sydow, does that make Annie Lennox Bibi or Harriet Andersson, or both?... Oh, Spandau, My Spandau: Thompson Twins, “Hold Me Now”—Wow! Just like the Mod Squad! One white, one black, one bald...Prologue Of The Month: .38 Special, “Back Where You Belong”—in which six overweight and/or balding and/or bearded guys make like Hill Street Blues detectives. ’Course, then they forget the plot and mix in some A Team motorcycle stunts and a French Connection subway reference, not to mention Donnie pulling a Stallone on a side of meat. Guess ideas are just brimming over in the .38 Special camp these days... Finally, just who is Pat Benatar’s dress designer? I mean, can we talk? Woman looks like walking shmatte. That black thing she has on on “Lipstick Lies”? UGH! Boy George, call your office.

THE ULTIMATE BJ

BILLY JOEL: Live From Long Island (CBS/Fox Video) ROXY MUSIC: The High Road EURYTHMICS: Sweet Dreams ABC: Mantrap (all RCA/Columbia Pictures Video)

by Dave DiMartino

If you ever want to experience truly negative charisma, may I make a suggestion?

Experience Billy Joel.

Only recently, due to perverted whim and lack of any other decent alternative, I actually saw the man in concert, and harrowing is not the word. Nauseating, maybe. Liked a couple of songs on An Innocent Man and his “Pressure” video and figured what the hell, right?

Right. Was it my fault I left before it was over? Yes. Indeed it was. I wanted to go home. In the words of my otherwise extremely soft-spoken wife: “This guy is an asshole.” She is certainly correct—and have you any of your own doubts, rest assured they’ll vanish immediately if you’re anywhere near a TV set when Live From Long Island shows up.

“I believe I am past the age of consciousness,” bellows the NY singer somewhere mid-tape here, typically not giving his audience enough credit. Surely they must realize this as they watch. Said videotape captures BJ in concert and in essence, thus making it a good production but a thoroughly depressing experience. Indeed, the dawning of rock videos, especially BJ’s nifty “Pressure” and “Tell Her About It,” has obscured the inescapable fact that many of today’s biggest kahunas are better left unseen, if not unheard. And our man Billy certainly numbers among these unfortunates.

Which brings up a very relevant point. If this is, in fact, the video age the Buggies once sang of, may we assume that the Billy Joels of this world are the Radio Stars that are going to eventually be killed? Whether we hope for this or not is irrelevant; whether we once liked Billy Joel but live out in the boondocks and thus could never actually see him perform live, but now that we can, through such videos, we have decided he is extraordinarily obnoxious—is. In short: if you were Billy Joel, what would you do?

Maybe take the opposite tack. Which is what ABC have done with their Mantrap, which you may have already seen on MTV. If not, no need to worry. It’s out, it’s cheap, and it’s worth watching. At least once, which may unfortunately be the point. Mantrap is basically ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love album transferred to the video medium, but “creatively.” Which means it isn’t a bunch of strung-together video shorts that follow the LF cut-for-cut—one fears the costs (and the psychic toll upon viewers) for that sort of project would be immeasurable—but something entirely different.

Mantrap is an actual “drama” starring the members of ABC and featuring their music prominently and, sometimes, incidentally. Its premise is quite vague: singer Martin Fry is coerced by a femme fatale to join the band on a tour to the Iron Curtain, the woman is actually planning to smuggle a Martin Fry lookalike (her lover?) out of the USSR by pulling the old switcheroo, and it would all probably make lots more sense if you watched the thing more than once. The relevant question, of course is would you?

I don’t know if I would. If I want a good spy flick, it isn’t going to star Martin Fry. And if I want to listen to ABC, I’m probably going to play the real album in the first place. So Mantrap seems something of a fluke. Like ABC themselves, it reeks of “class,” dollars, facades, and a lot of people in love with their own image. It isn’t an ABC concert—and if that’s what you’re looking for, forget it.

More interesting is The High Road, not least because the people responsible for it reeked of class sans quotation marks when Martin was small Fry indeed. Roxy Music’s first commercially available video is nothing more than a simple concert recording, but for those of us who missed the band’s Avalon tour of ’82, it’s the closest we’ll ever get to being there. A tad late for the ’84 standard—tour, HBO or Showtime special (or if you’re bigtime, a Hal Ashby movie) then software—it’s nevertheless a harbinger of Rock From Now On. So you might as well enjoy it.

Roxy’s tape features the Avalon band of Bryan Ferry, Andy MacKay, Phil Manzanera and studio flunkies, which is fine by me until oldies like “Do The Strand” and “Editions Of You” show up. Point One: of all bands, don’t let Roxy Music be the one to remind me how old I’m getting. The songs and their performance hint of a nostalgia I didn’t think the band had in them; at the actual concert such tunes might’ve been climactic, but on the tube they start to smell like product fully paid for and delivered. And there’s enough material on the band’s last three albums to fully captivate any audience I’d care to be a part of.

Point Two—and a point you’ll be hearing brought up more and more: in what vault does all the footage of bands like Roxy Music sit? I remember a night in a college bar many years ago, drinking moderately while one of the latenight rock shows, Midnight Special or In Concert, featured a full Roxy Music concert originating from somewhere in London, I think. Where does stuff like this go? Who owns it? Why does it sit at home, alone, while material like The High Road sees the light of day? Do the people who make decisions about releasing product like this ever do market research? Do they ask 300 Roxy Music fans , what material, given a choice, they would like to see? Do they say, “what the fuck—we got rights to it, let’s see if it sells”? Do they donate all the proceeds to charity?

In this unsettling world, then, we must look for stability wherever we may find it. The Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams may or may not provide such stability, but at least it does not provide the gut-wrenching spectacle of a Billy Joel boldly advising his audience “don’t take any shit from ANYBODY!” before lumbering offstage. In fact, the Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox goes out of her way to give shit to everybody, certainly in terms of her appearance, and it goes down remarkably well at every turn.

Sweet Dreams (The Video Album) mixes both the ABC and Roxy Music video approaches examined here, and not a bit gratuitously. There is live footage from England’s notorious Heaven club, interspersed with several of their better known video shorts—including the excellent “Love Is A Stranger” and “Who’s That Girl.” There are two performances of “Sweet Dreams”—one onstage, one the original Girl As Hitler Amid Cows clip. There are even little animated puppets of Annie and Dave Eurythmic that recall our earlier, private times spent watching the heartwarming Davy And Goliath series on early morning TV. In fact, there is just about the right amount of everything on this video production . Which leads me to suggest that perhaps those in the business of producing such things might want to consider Sweet Dreams a very engaging role model to build entire new careers around.

On the other hand, there is every indication they might not want to be bothered.