For better or (much) worse, it seems that rock and video are in the process of tying the knot in a big way. (Rumors that the two HAD to get hitched are unsubstantiated and beyond the scope of this column, anyway.) Recently, however, there have been signs of a third partner in this groovy menage a trois.

Hollywood.

Now rock and Hollywood have been flirting for a long time, ever since the days of The Blackboard Jungle. There have been hard days' nights, juvenile delinquent wrecks, beach blanket bombs, psychedelic trip^flieks, strawberry statements—a thousand-and-one low-budget drivein fantasies capitalizing on a ready market for loud music, teenage angst, and perky breasts.

It didn't take long for money moguls to turn rbck 'n' roll into Rock: The Movie. Occasionally this has been great fun—a chance to see for two bucks a band that you'd never see otherwise. Often it was hilarious, as 'far out' kids would romp about in bikinis and speak in tongues that scriptwriters would lift from the pages of Time, Life, and other anthropological journals. At worst— Bangladesh comes to mind purely on the strength of the number of times I failed to sit through the whole thing—it was, well, the worst.

Then there was Elvis.

If you ever need a textbook case of what the Hollywood star machinery at its worst can do, just look at how it helped turn Elvis-thePelvis into Otis-the-Bloatis. A few great scenes notwithstanding, Elvis was essentially big-name lunchmeat, making the same movie 20 times with different titles, and in the process losing most of whatever greatness he had left after the Army got through with him.

While much has changed in the past 15 years, one thing is still the same—music and film co-exist only to the extent that they rake in the cash. And that's where video comes into the picture. In case you haven't figured it out yet, the latest media trend is the Rock Movie/Soundtrack Album/Trailer Video multi-mediamarketing package (otherwise known as the Flashdance Factor), in which the video plugs the movie, which plugs the soundtrack, which in turn generates sales for the movie.

What you the EMP-T-V viewer get for your patience is a video culled from all the action shots in the movie, set to some horrible bleating by the likes of Michael Setnbello, Frank Stallone or Phil Collins. The movies themselves, meanwhile, are beginning to look more like 90-minute videos, and we know how much thinking went into most of those, don't we?

So what do you get when you combine the worst aspect of movies, video and rock?

Hits—so you might as well get used to it.

SNAP SHOTS

FAVES: Hunters And Collectors' 'Taking To A Stranger' is atmospheric and genuinely creepy, which wouldn't be that big of a deal except more often than not a video that's intended to be spooky ends up as one big load of yuks, like Rockwell's brilliantly dumb 'Somebody's Watching Me.' Har Har Har.

Alan Parsons: 'Don't Answer Me'—Nice cartoon animation on this one, too bad it seems to have little or nothing to do with the song. For that matter, too bad about the song. HATES: Manfred Mann: 'Runner'—Having had some success with 'Spirit In The Night a few years back—and precious little since— these guys dusted off Springsteen's line about a 'runner in the night,' dressed it up as a new song, and then gave the video a timely Olympics theme. Pretty clever, huh?

Huey, Dewey, Louie & The News: 'Heart Of Rock 'N' Roll'— More dumbness. 1 have no doubt that the gesture of inserting vintage clips of Presley, Berry, and Little Richard was a sincere tribute on the part of ol' puppy-dog-eyes. Heck, they're even kind of fun. It's just that these snippets of greatness say more about this band's guys-next-door/go with the flow nature than I could ever hope to.

What could be worse than Billy Idol and his 'Me Tarzan' chestpounding, you ask? THREE Billy Idols, courtesy of the Police's 'Synchronicity II' video, that's what. Hey guys, you mama dressed you funny.

I realize that the untimely deaths of John Lennon and Jim Morrison probably relieved their respective record companies of oodles of anticipated earnings, but is that any excuse for this shit? I'm referring, of course, to the necrophilic videos for Lennon's Milk And Honey and the Doors new live scrapings. The buttocks-of-the(dead) -stars routine in 'Stepping Out' is bad enough, but the simul-sex shtick with Morrison's pants and belt buckle in 'Gloria' is the pits. Everyone responsible die now!

Digital video FX are just beginning to leave a major mark on rock videos, and already things are starting to smell funny. Thoinas Dolby's 'Hyperactive' and the Cars' 'You Might Think' dress up second-rate material with every dopey effect they can think of, taking the video/eye-candy analogy to new extremes.

Yes, meanwhile, take FX to XS and the result is their video(s) for 'Leave It.' The joke is that they made not one but 15 variations on the same video, in which they do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! The punchline, of course, is the speed at which viewers will lunge for the channel button after this dawns on them.

HI-FINANCE

Dave DiMartino

For all the blabbering about the Video Revolution and how the world as we know it is going through a drastic change, you'd be forgiven for dismissing most of it as mindless twaddle and going about your merry way. Not to deny that Michael Jackson's big-budget excursions into the video realm probably resulted in an extra few million copies of Thriller being sold this week. That's just the way it is. But that success, and the continual success of MTV in 'shifting units' of occasionally underwhelming records, points toward a new musical future that promises to be significantly different for those of us used to the way the biz previously worked.

To ignore the basic line of logic— that from 1984 on, all it'll take to make a hit record will be a spectacular video and heavy MTV rotation—there's another very significant change awaiting record buyers in the next few years.

There's that word: record. It's part of the language, right now. But it probably won't be for long.

What we're really talking about here is the way in which music, is 'played' for the consumer. In the past, the system has taken a well known course: Joe Blow makes a record, a radio station plays it, a cortsumer hears it, tushes to the record store and buys it, and then brings it home and plays it. 45 or 33-V3 RPM, that's usually been the bottom line. But: things have changed. Won't bore you with specifics, but surely you realize that in the past 15 years or so, listening to music hasn't been such a cut-and-dried process. Remember four-track tapes? Remember eight-track tapes? These things once existed, I assure you, but even now you'll be hard-pressed to find a record company producing them. Cassettes, as you know, took over. And are taking over.

In early 1984, sales of records as compared to cassettes are surprisingly on the wane. Albums by heavy metal bands like Def Leppard, Quiet Riot and Van Halen, for instance, should probably not even be called 'albums' anymore, except for the sake of convenience. They're simply selling more copies of them in the tape format. Why not call them tapes, with the accompanying 'album' for those who still buy albums, you ask? Give it a few years.

And by now you've heard of the Compact Disc, which many people consider the perfect sound medium. Flayed on the proper (and becoming increasingly cheaper) system, these alrciost-indestructible $15-20 discs reproduce sound so perfectly that hi-fi magazines can't even tell any of the systems apart, soundwise. They usually just rate the machines in terms of added features and easeto-use.

All of which leads up to the purpose of this ramble. Sony, the same company which gave us the video recorder—remember when they were all called Betamaxes?—has been instrumental in pioneering a new music format that, strictly speaking, is second only to the Compact Disc—whjch, not incidentally, they also invented. Sony's latest innovation came about last year or so; they call it Beta Hi-Fi.

You've probably heard all about Beta Hi-Fi: it's a video recording system in which the sound signal is fed along with the video signal to a video recorder's rotating video heads. What it all means, basically, is that with some brilliant engineering the Sony people figured out a Wfiy to give you sound quality that surpasses every known method of reproduction—including the standard open-reel tape deck—except for their own digital Compact Disc.

The end result: just a few short months after Sony introduced the system, other companies came up with their own systems, and prices were driven down. And when you start dealing in sound quality that high, at prices that low, you do what lots of people do—Stevie Wonder, for instance—and buy the video system solely for its hi-fi purposes.

Think about it. You lay down $600 for a machine that allows you to record anything you'd like that's on television. Don't care about TV? Fine. You've bought a machine that can serve as a super hi-fi recording system, so just use it for that. Plop down six or seven bucks at an appliance store, get yourself a five-hour videocassette tape, and there you go: five-hours of super fidelity at a fraction of the line (and quite likely inferior) reel-to-reel recorder. Hook it up to your home stereo system and you won't ever need to leave your house again. But...

THE PAYOFF

But...Sony does not want you to stay at home. Instead, they want you to go to your nearest video store and pick up their latest Video 45.

'Video 45'—sounds sort of bogus, no? Truth is, greater marketing coups have been made with dopier concepts. The Video 45, which Sony pioneered, brings you three or four rock videos—the same rock videos you might've seen on MTV, mind you—to play at your convenience over and over, for just 15 bucks or so.

That $15 might seem unreasonable until you think about it a little. Sony's 45s are in the Beta Hi-Fi format—which means that if you really like Duran Duran, for instance, and want to hear 'Girls On Film'— forget watching it—your best bet in terms of sound quality will probably be that very same Sony 45. Or a Compact Disc, of course, but don't forget: you can't watch one of those. And unless you're a super hi-fi fanatic or just plain abnormal, you won't be able to tell the difference.

Don't forget—you can't scratch a tape. Want to listen to the song in your car? Just dub a copy onto your home cassette deck. There'll be no comparison if you play it back-toback with a copy you made from an LP; you won't hear surface noise, ticks or popping, and the difference in dynamic range would be apparent to anyone with one functional eardrum.

THE ACTUAL GOODS

There are many. Sony has been issuing their Videq 45s for about a year, and what's out there now is about as mixed in quality as any record company's yearly output. The past few months have offered Sheena Easton, Iron Maiden, Kajagoogoo, J. Geils, Phil Collins, Naked Eyes and many more; best bet would have to be the David Bowie tape, which offers the 'uncensored' version of 'Let's Dance,' featuring bonus buns and much less than you'd imagine. Past product includes Todd Rundgren and Utopia in two separate sets, Duran Duran, and unadventurous jazz outings by Lionel Hampton and Cannuck bandleader Rob McConnell, among others.

Take note: those who favor the much more predominant VHS video system need not feel left out in the cold. Sony has also been producing similarly-priced VHS versions of their 45s. And while these tapes might not sound as good as the Beta Hi-Fi versions (it simply hasn't been physically possible), with the recent introduction of the competitive VHS Hi-Fi system, there's a good chance they soon will.

The focus here, however, is riot on quality but on quantity. There are a lot of these things being produced, and most of then are available right now, at your hipper record stores. They will continue being available, at significantly less hip record stores. They are, in fact, available from now on, and will be around longer than you or I will. Just ask Sony..