I’m usually not prone to getting into discussions like this very often, but it does seem to me that, as regards music videos, art does appear to be losing the cultural tug of war with its old partner/ nemesis, commerce. I say this in particular this month because it’s late June as I’m writing, and the airwaves are being simply flooded at the moment with that most dreaded of all clip genres— namely, the “movie soundtrack video.” I honestly can’t think of a major motion picture being released right now that doesn’t have an accompanying video designed to try and coax you into plunking down five or six bucks for what may or may not be a complete waste of an hourand-a-half of your life, but hey, isn’t that theme song something! And even if the movie stinks, you can still buy the record!

This, of course, seems to be the main marketing strategy of the rather unholy alliance between film companies and record companies—an alliance that first bore real fruit with such music-driven movies as Flashdance and Footloose, movies that had great intertwined box office/record store success. The problem at this juncture, though, is that mainly what I’ve been seeing lately are videos for songs from films in which the format is always the same: artist or group is shown performing song with interspersed shots from the film all adding up to nothing more than a trailer of coming attractions with music over it. The only difference is that we’re told this is a video and not an ad.

This started me thinking. Since they say that a good trailer gives you a sense of a movie, maybe I can save everybody some time and money by running through what appear to be the plots of several of this year’s hot summer releases based on what they show you in the video. So here are our Video Video capsule reviews, to be used by you, the consumer, as you see fit:

TOP GUN (Video: “Danger Zone,’’ Kenny Loggins)—This is a movie with Tom Cruise, the guy whose claim to fame so far has been lip-synching to Bob Seger in his underwear (that’s his, not Seger’s) in Risky Business. Here he’s mostly not in his underwear but in a military uniform, and he seems to be spending most of his time learning how to fly a jet fighter plane. When he’s not in his plane, he’s sticking his tongue down the throat of the Amish girl from Witness, who should be ashamed of herself. Someone’s plane gets blown up, but since the U.S. isn’t officially at war with anybody, it must be an accident. Everybody cries, and then graduates.

LEGAL EAGLES (Video: “Love Touch,” Rod Stewart) —This is a movie with a lot of good looking people who all seem to be well off; in particular, Robert Redford, who apparently is involved in both a professional and private way with both Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah, who are, of course, about half his age, but maybe he thinks of it as the two of them equals one relationship and then it’s not so unrealistic. Anyway, Winger is dressed pretty conservatively here, so don’t expect any of the steamy stuff from Officer And A Gentleman or Urban Cowboy— she’s an actress now, you see. Not so for Daryl, though, so her and Bobby make goo-goo and there’s probably enough of that to make the movie a hit. And, just in case you don’t remember that Hannah was in Splash, everybody here gets rained on a lot. In the climax, the three stars go on trial for being all wet.

COBRA (Video: “Voice of America’s Sons,” John Cafferty And The Beaver Brown Band)—Rambo brings the war home, where it belongs. People tell me that this is a very violent movie but according to the video this is simply the heartwarming story of an upstanding, law-abiding American citizen who lets off steam by playing around with his old Vietnam machine guns and crashing into cars on the highway on the weekends. He seems very angry except when this girl is around and then he’s very protective. He’s nice to children, too. Fun for the whole family.

Well, there you have it. The Video Video “Sneak Preview” movie guide. And remember, as theatre owner Rodney Dangerfield says to the guy running the concession stand in The Projectionist, “The soda’s not selling? Put more salt in the popcorn!”

SNAP SHOTS

There’s Never A Salieri Around When You Need One: Falco, “Rock Me Amadeus”— Or, fopping your way into the Top Ten. I dunno, if you were a bunch of bikers, would you allow a foreigner in a wig that looked like it was dipped in a vat of melted Fourth-of-July Good Humor bars to be in the same room as you—and live? Gimme Pee-wee Herman doing “Tequila” in his big shoes any day... Godzilla Died For Our Sins! Loudness, “Let It Go”—Or, Cheap Trick meets Journey in the land of sushi. And wouldn’t you know it—us ugly Americans are so jaded at this point that the fact that the band is lip-synching makes it virtually impossible to watch without cracking up...

Nearer My Garter To Thee: Heart, “Nothin’ At AH”—I dunno; Nancy starts taking off half her clothes in these new Heart videos and looks embarrassed, while Ann puts on twice as many clothes and looks embarrassed. Oh, well; as our pal at the Daily News, video columnist Jim Farber, recently observed, isn’t Ann starting to look exactly like W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless?... Finally, it’s taken two years, but MTV’s matronly sister station, VH-1, has finally broken a hit— Simply Red’s “Holding Back The Years,” a video that’s been around for at least four months, and “made it” first on the easy listening circuit. Kordosh, take heart—Roger Whittaker will overcome someday.

TEXAS TEA

MOTOWN TIME CAPSULE: THE ’60s MOTOWN TIME CAPSULE: THE ’70s MOTOWN’S MUSTANG (all MCA Home Video)

by Dave DiMartino

When they finally get to issuing Motown Time Capsule: The ’80s in the year 2000, I hope they remember the part about how certain record companies milked themselves dry in 1986.

I just sat through two hours and 43 minutes of the three videotapes listed above, which was about two hours more than I needed to, and I can barely remember any of them. You won’t either. So don’t ask me to synopsize. Just read this:

“Motown Time Capsule: The ’60s features the sights and sounds of one of the most turbulent decades in our nation’s history. From the Kennedys to the civil rights movement, from miniskirts to the man on the moon, it’s all set to the music that defined the times—the Motown Sound.

“Motown Time Capsule: The ‘70s offers an exciting tour through this colorful decade that saw the end of a seemingly endless war, the beginning of the disco craze, and the fall of a president. It’s an irresistible combination of music and events captured on video.”

Since that stuff came on an MCA Home Video press release, I guess they didn’t bother including the part about how it should make lots of money since no other record company has thought about doing it yet.

What have they done? Taken lots of period clips from TV— news events, shows, commercials, assassinations ’n’ stuff—and tacked on lots of music from the same era. We hear the Miracles sing ‘‘Shop Around,” we see America during 1960—big cars, big teeth, chrome, aluminum, consumerism, happy families, you name it. Shop around—get it? Yeah, sure, and every once in a while you might see a vintage clip of the Miracles, or Mary Wells, or the Supremes, but more often you won’t. There’ll be President Kennedy, little JohnJohn saluting his dead dad, Fidel Castro, Nikita “Gregg” Khruschev, Martin Luther King, Hertz commercials, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, all of it equal in import to “The Way You Do The Things You Do,” “You Keep Me Hanging On”. and"“For Once In My Life.”

Mind you, it’s not a bad idea. And from a consumer standpoint, owning the visual clips is a deal in itself. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got two VCRs, and it’s always a blast to make your own videos if you’ve got the right source material. You know, follow a 10-second hardcore porno clip with Godzilla, a box of Tide, a woman screaming, Reagan giving his State Of The Union, animal sex scenes from PBS, Neil Young, stock market quotes, another box of Tide but this time with the sound of the woman screaming, Raymond Burr, Fozzy Bear, more porn, the scene from The Gates Of Hell where the guy throws up his intestines, a Jello commercial...you know. Great fun for those “special” times. And now here’s that clip of man walking on the moon you always wanted.

But. My view of the ’60s is my own. I enjoy hearing this music—and it sounds great in Hi-Fi, true—but I don’t really associate it with any of the events on this tape. Maybe someone else does. So I suppose it’d be wiser for me to dub the visuals on my second VCR and add my own personal faves; I’d watch it more than once that way, probably.

But. Motown Records is sitting on one of the most distinguished musical catalogs America’s got, and Motown Records knows it. And Motown Records knows it can make a bundle by following up the Big Chill soundtrack with more music from the Big Chill “era.” And even more. And by continually issuing compact disc after compact disc of “new” compilations that are half great, half filler. And now Motown Records is not only releasing this video—in the words of MCA’s press release, “the original soundtracks will be released simultaneously on Motown Records and Cassettes.” We are not talking art; we are talking marketing tools.

Nothing makes this point clearer than Motown's Mustang, which, as these sort of things go, is horrendous. It’s a 43 minute “mini-movie,” which “features 11 top Motown hits in one exciting new original story.” The story consists of a 1964 Mustang—or a 1965 Mustang, depending on what part of the “mini-movie” you choose to believe (there is something called “continuity” that makers of mini-movies might want to read up on)—and its trials and tribulations upon emerging from the Detroit assembly line. Yep, it’s all here: a love interest, a car chase, hippies, politics, guys dying in Vietnam, pesky kids and more! And though the sight of a stray cameraman or the random shifts from video to film and back may seem jarring to those who look for professionalism in their mini-movies, at least there’s those 11 top Motown hits to hold things together.

You bet.

The highlight of all three? No question: the Motown’s Mustang cameo appearance by Adolfo “Shabba-Doo” Quinones. I don’t know which one he was, but that’s quite a name he’s got, isn’t it?