I Want My MTV (72 page)

 

DJ JAZZY JEFF:
One of Mike's friends was at the shoot, and he said, “If Mike likes you, he's gonna throw a lot of punches at you.” And every time Mike was around me, he was throwing punches. He'd pull his punches an inch away from my face. My life would flash before my eyes. But Mike was cool. He stayed for a while, did two or three scenes, and then said, “Ahh, I don't feel like doing this no more. I'm done.”

 

ANN CARLI:
Will and Mike were fake sparring. Mike's hitting Will, not hard. Will taps him on the cheek and Mike grabs his face and goes, “Ow! Ow!” And Tyson walked off the set. We were told by Don King that Will had cracked Tyson's tooth, and he had to go to the dentist. This was the only time I've ever felt in actual danger at a shoot.

 

HANK SHOCKLEE:
I thought Public Enemy's “Fight the Power” was gonna be in
Do the Right Thing
for maybe a minute. I had no idea Spike Lee was gonna use the song in the entire movie. Once we saw that, Spike said, “I want to direct a video for it.” His idea was to stage a rally in Brooklyn and film it. And I was like,
Wow, that's ambitious
.

 

CHUCK D:
To me, every video was a pain. And “Fight the Power” was convoluted, because of the magnitude of it. It was big, and there was no room for error. We had about four thousand people in a one-block area. Plus, it was raining.

 

HANK SHOCKLEE:
Spike contacted schools and youth organizations in Brooklyn. We were driving out to Brooklyn, early in the morning, and the energy level was amazing. By 8 A.M., people started coming in. Then more and more people started coming in. By 9 A.M., the streets were mobbed. I didn't know there were that many people on the planet. It was massive.

 

CHUCK D:
Spike was trying to remember the legacy of the past, the present, and the future of black people in America, all in one video. The marriage of film and rap music had never been planned that distinctly. That wasn't the first rap video, but it was the first time it was planned to be a significant statement in culture and art.

 

HANK SHOCKLEE:
The set design people made banners. Public Enemy performed “Fight the Power” at the end of the rally, and Spike made it look like something out of the '60s, like a cross between the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King's march on Washington. And the video created a groundswell for the movie. From that perspective, it was brilliant. Spike was doing branding at a level people are only starting to get on today. He took the hottest underground group at the time and shot a huge video that shows a massive rally in the heart of Brooklyn. People said, “I want to know more. This is a soundtrack? To what?
Do the Right Thing
? What's that about? We want to do the right thing. Should we rally? Should we protest? I want to go see this movie.” It was about something bigger than the song.

It was the only video that captured the energy and spirit of black youth at that moment, when the black community was on the borderline of hopelessness. When you saw the energy of those kids, it's a contagious thing. You're feeding energy to an energy source, because kids' energy is off the charts. Whatever the video lacked from an artistic level, Spike bottled the spirit of a revolution and put it in a three-minute video. That solidified not only Public Enemy's growth and appeal, but also the movement of rap music and its influence. Look, rap hasn't slowed down yet. This video helped spark that.

 

MC HAMMER:
My idea for “U Can't Touch This” was a celebration to counter the darkness I was seeing in Oakland, because of all the crack. All of a sudden, guys were cutting heads off—literally. Instead of shooting someone once, they'd shoot 'em thirty times. Uncles started pimping their nieces for crack. It was stuff you'd never seen before. I wanted a visual that would give you a form of escape and joy and fun.

MICK KLEBER:
With “U Can't Touch This,” we knew we had a hit on our hands, and we needed to step up and spend some money. I'd been reading a bunch of books on Fred Astaire, and Astaire never let himself be filmed any way other than head to toe. All his little in-between movements were the hallmarks of his artistry, and Hammer felt the same way. So when we did “U Can't Touch This,” we focused on filming continuous sequences of Hammer performing his dance moves, with no cuts.

Those harem pants came out of nowhere. When I first saw them I thought,
This will either go down as the most brilliant wardrobe idea in the history of music video, or a total laughingstock
. But once you saw him move in them, against a white backdrop, you knew it was going to kill.

 

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT:
Mick Kleber got a little frustrated, because Hammer and I—I'm not saying we ran our own show; Mick was creative and smart, but Hammer couldn't pick him out of a lineup of one. The classic thing that would happen is, my phone would ring about 4 A.M. “Yo, Rupes, wake up. It's Hammer. I'm in Detroit, and we want to do a shoot on Saturday.” Oh, great. Well, whereabouts? “Yes, so Saturday, Detroit, all right?” Click. I would fall back to sleep, wake up four hours later, and go,
Did I dream that?
Then I'd call Capitol Records and say, “So, great news, we're doing a video on Saturday.” “Oh,” they'd say. “Tell us more. We haven't heard from Mr. Hammer about this. Did he mention which song we're doing a video for?” I'd jump on a plane and get out there, pull a producer, start booking crew. And then Friday, Capitol would go, “All right, it's confirmed, you're doing a shoot.”

 

MC HAMMER:
I never let the label hire my directors. I was firm in my belief that you didn't want a director who was already vested in his approach to making videos. Rupert Wainwright had the perfect personality to counter mine. We could argue, we could fight, we could insult each other, and then we could hug and love each other. I'd take my time to get into what I call “I'm ready” mode. I understand a dancer's mentality, so I'd keep the crew loud and wild, and it would always interrupt something Rupert was trying to do.

 

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT:
I was always putting my foot in it, because the racial terms in England are different to the racial terms in America. I was onstage with Hammer, trying to get a rehearsal going—we were shooting a concert the next day, and he was also rehearsing his live show. I'm quite pushy on the set. And I was like, “We've got to get focused here,” and he's ignoring me. I said something like, “Just get over here, boy.” And there was total silence. Like, two hundred people went,
Oh my fucking God
. Hammer looked at me good-naturedly and said, “I'm not your boy. You're my boy.” Somehow I knew I'd said the wrong thing, but it just slipped out, and I didn't quite know how it was the wrong thing.

 

MC HAMMER:
Showing my dancing was most important to me. Boogalooing, roboting, it began in Oakland, California, in 1968, Fremont High School, 6 P.M. one night in between a high school basketball game. The first guy did what we called a robot boogaloo move, and then it took off from the Bay Area and went to LA and jumped all the way to New York. In '75, disco came, and San Francisco was one of the epicenters for disco. Disco dancing incorporated modern and jazz and tap. I mastered that style. Most video choreography was Broadway style, and I brought synchronization with street moves. My videos catapulted that style of dance to the world.

 

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT:
On “U Can't Touch This,” they wanted to totally re-brand Hammer as a full-on pop star, instead of being a rapper. So we shot it with lots of pretty colors, and at the same time, I was shooting a movie of the week,
Dillinger
, with Mark Harmon and Sherilyn Fenn. I had to go back on location, so I gave the video footage to the editor. Hammer watched it and said, “This is no good. You can't see my dance moves.” I'm like, “Hammer, I love you, but trust me, nobody in America wants to watch you jiggle from one side of the stage to another for twelve seconds.” He's like, “Listen, Rupe, let me sit here with the editor and work with him.” I had to go back to Ohio and finish
Dillinger
, so I said, “You guys play with it and send me a copy when you're done.” I got a FedEx package, and when I watched “U Can't Touch This” in my hotel room, I said, “Oh God, my days of directing music videos are over. I'll never work again.” It just looked so slow.

Guess what? Hammer was right! It's one of the most popular videos of all time.

 

MC HAMMER:
I introduced a new style of cutting videos, which video editors, after this, called “The Hammer Cut.” It was the completion of a dance move without interrupting the move. I learned this from Michael Jackson; Michael would sit in on the editing of his videos. He'd make sure editors did not mess up his dancing with their editing. I wanted to keep up with the energy of the record: a dance move, then cut to the story, then cut to some color, more energy, then jump back. I had to come up with a faster cut. I would tell the editor, “Oh no, no, no. This is all wrong. Let's start over.”

 

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT:
I was shooting a video with Hammer and we were doing a club scene in a bad part of LA, on Olympic Blvd. Hammer was kind of in hiding, because there was a certain guy, who shall be nameless, who was basically kidnapping people. Bobby Brown had gone back to Atlanta because his mother had been kidnapped. This guy was trying to get to Hammer and shake him down.

So we were doing a scene in a nightclub during the day, and a prop guy said to me, “When are we shooting the scene with the Uzi?” I said, “We're not shooting a scene with an Uzi.” He said, “Well, a couple of guys in the back have got Uzis.” I went, “Oh fuck.” We called the police and got everybody out of the club, out onto the sidewalk. Three cop cars turn up. We explain what's going on. The cops don't even turn their engines off. They said, “Send everybody home now, and get out of here.” That should have happened on the N.W.A shoot, but it happened on a Hammer shoot.

 

RIC MENELLO:
Russell Simmons asked me to direct “Children's Story” for Slick Rick. And Russell wanted midgets. We shot in Central Park and put a bed there. Slick Rick is reading a bedtime story, and two girls were in bed with the midget, Little Jimmy. There were supposed to be two midgets. But one midget was a horrible guy. He'd done a lot of porno. He wouldn't sign a release. I said, “All right, get the fuck out of here. We'll use one midget.” Little Jimmy walked out about three-quarters of the way through the video. He kept saying, “I want to dance.” So I had him dance on the bed. Suddenly he goes, “You're making fun of me!” He jumped up, landed on the bed, belly flopped off, and walked away. Slick Rick's DJ, Vance, followed him, yelling, “Yo, midget dick! Don't ever show your face again.”

 

BILL ADLER:
The song is a ghetto tale, it's dire and heart-wrenching. If you represented the story in a video, MTV wouldn't go anywhere near it. So instead, Rick played it for laughs.

RIC MENELLO:
One of my assistants was holding Slick Rick's coat, and she put it down on a bench. I'm like, “When I tell you to hold the coat, hold it.” She goes, “There's a butcher knife in it.” I don't know, I got along with him.

 

LIONEL MARTIN:
On “Just a Friend,” I came up with the idea to make Biz Markie look like Mozart. We put a wig on him. We put him at the piano. The funny thing was, he told me that in the studio, he played all the instruments. And it just looked off to me. I was like, “Biz, didn't you say you played the piano when you recorded the song?” He said, “Yeah, but the keys were numbered.” You knew he was lying to you, but he was just so colorful.

He was really late to the shoot. He called and said, “Lionel, I'm on the Long Island Expressway and I got a flat tire.” He called an hour later and said, “I fixed the flat, and now the other tire is flat.”

 

BIG DADDY KANE:
Fab 5 Freddy was sick of me the day he directed “Erase Racism” for Kool G Rap. He was trying to keep everything on schedule, and he had the scene set up in a graveyard, basically saying that racism can result in death. But we got there and I was like, “I'm not going in no graveyard.” If it was up to me, I'd miss my own funeral. So we had to find a new location to shoot my scene. He was hot about that.

 

EVERLAST:
There's no better way to do a video than the way House of Pain did “Jump Around,” because it wasn't even work. This was the era of Afrocentric black power, and we have Irish lineage, so we went to the St. Paddy's Day parade in NewYork. We were drinking at five in the morning. We went to the parade and acted crazy, and we were still drinking at five the next morning.

We didn't get permits, we just went to the parade, bounced in and out, got kicked out, filmed fights happening on Madison Avenue. People drunk, fighting, puking, and it captured the insanity and stupidity. That's all real shit, man. We knew what was going to happen: drunken fighting. Do you know any Irish people? Fighting is like the peak; that's when you know they're having the most fun, when they're fighting.

The success of “Jump Around” put me off MTV for a minute. I was like, I'm glad it's happening, but how many times do I have to watch my own video? I couldn't believe how many times they played it. Later on, we were spending $100,000 or $200,000 on videos, and I was like, “The one we made for $10,000 was better.”

 

SIR MIX-A-LOT:
In “Baby Got Back,” we were making fun of videos. Black men have always liked voluptuous women. I got tired of seeing skinny girls in videos. Rick Rubin and the director, Adam Bernstein, decided the video was gonna be about a bunch of hot chicks doing their thing with a big Sir Mix-a-Lot scaffolding across the screen. I expected to see a butt about the size of a Volkswagen. Instead, it was probably twenty-five to thirty feet tall, and twenty feet across the butt cheeks. I was kind of in awe. I had done a couple of videos on an independent label, and we didn't have casting calls like that. We had to get a bunch of ex-prostitutes to be in those.