I Want My MTV (81 page)

 

 

 

WHEN CDs WERE INTRODUCED IN 1983, FEWER
than a million were sold. Four years later, annual sales were at 102 million, surpassing the number of LPs sold. After another four years, CDs were outselling cassettes. This funneled a lot of money into the record business and created a bubble that lasted well into the '90s—not only were CDs priced higher than the other formats, many people were now buying CD versions of music they already owned on album or cassette. Labels had more money, and they spent more money.

Video budgets had been growing steadily, and now the money was put to good use. U2 and R.E.M. crossed over into the mainstream, and brought artsy, cinematic sensibilities to big-bucks productions. Bono said U2 was “reacting against the perfect cinematography and the beautiful art direction—it's all too beautiful, too much like an ad.” He added, “These days we are being fed a very airbrushed, advertising-man's way of seeing the world.” For years, R.E.M. had made anti-video videos: singer Michael Stipe called one clip a “response to videos which objectify and berate women.” Now Stipe starred in a deluxe video, shot in a style that could be called Gothic Technicolor, directed by an eccentric Indian immigrant who more or less retired from videos after winning six VMAs.

The spirit of invention even spread all the way to Van Halen, who made a video without any hot chicks in it.

 

TARSEM SINGH:
Record labels were pursuing me to make videos while I was at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. My work in school was fucking awesome! Most people did music videos so they could go on to do commercials. But I did music videos because I
loved
them. I was like a prostitute in love with his profession; I would've fucked them for free, but they were paying me!

I did some videos while I was in school—En Vogue, Suzanne Vega—but after I graduated, I only did two. The first was R.E.M.'s “Losing My Religion.”

I'd grown up in Iran and India, so with my vocabulary of English being limited, I didn't think “religion” had another meaning. So I took Michael Stipe's poetry and fucked it up, and did a literal interpretation of it.

I took a rough story from Gabriel García Márquez's “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” about an angel who falls down into this plane, and becomes an inspiration for some and a circus show for others. And I said, “I want to do Caravaggio-style paintings of one world, another world of Russian propaganda posters, and a third of heaven, from where the angel falls,” which is very much like how Indians treat their gods and goddesses—which in the West, I think you'd call “very gay.”

 

PATTI GALLUZZI:
Tom Freston started saying, “I hate being so much about hair bands. I hate hair bands. We need to play less hair bands.” And I thought,
Oh my God, yes, thank you
. Because we were so Winger, Slaughter heavy.

 

MICHAEL STIPE:
“Losing My Religion” was the first video I'd ever lip-synced in, so it was an important moment for me. The thing that brought me to that was seeing Sinead O'Connor's “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which is unbelievably raw and powerful. In what appeared to be a single shot, she stared down a camera and meant it and actually cried tears. I saw that and thought,
You know what? This isn't fake.

 

PATTI GALLUZZI:
R.E.M. are my favorite band of all time, and when “Losing My Religion” came in, and it was spectacular, I put it into ultra-heavy rotation. Yes, we had Queensryche in heavy rotation at the same time. But it was like,
Now this is my channel. I'm doing what I want. I don't care that R.E.M.'s not that popular
.

 

TARSEM SINGH:
I shot with them for eight hours, we did expensive things, and it was dreadful. I was getting so nervous, I kept throwing up in the toilet, and of course the AD thought I was on drugs. I threw up like mad, and when I got out of the toilet, I gathered everybody and said, “Let's just have the rest of the band stand in the back and Michael dance in front of this window.” When it was done, I said, “I hope they like it. They could call it gay, they could call it pretentious.”

I didn't do another video for two and a half years, when I put in four months and $40,000 of my own money to make Deep Forest's “Sweet Lullaby.” What else is money for if you aren't gonna blow it?

 

MICHAEL STIPE:
Tarsem had this idea to put me in classical Bollywood poses, on my knees, twisted to one side, with one arm raised and staring into the camera. And it was not working, and it was not working, and it was not working. He went off and vomited. He said, “I threw up in the bathroom. This isn't working. What do we do?” We talked for a bit, and I said, “Let me be a performer. Let me do what I do.”

I did a herky-jerky dance based on Sinead O'Connor's “Last Day of Our Acquaintance” video, plus a little David Byrne. You can see Peter Buck in the background, looking super-dour.

 

ANTON CORBIJN:
Many years after “Pride,” when I'd been told not to get near U2 with a video camera, I was approached by Bono to make a video for “One.” It was a weird situation again. I put all these ideas into it: Berlin, which had been two cities, had just become one; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one; man and woman are one. The band dressed as women, to illustrate that. It was very easy to get them in drag. Which of them looked cutest in a dress? Well, it wasn't Bono.

 

PAUL McGUINNESS:
We found some pushback from programmers who didn't like the idea of men in drag. We decided to make another video so they would have a choice. That's probably my favorite U2 video, Anton's “One.”

 

ANTON CORBIJN:
But they wouldn't give it to MTV. They said the video wouldn't work for them. They took a beautiful David Wojnarowicz photo of bisons and quickly made that into a video for the time being, while they commissioned somebody else to do a video, Phil Joanou, and he shot Bono and some models in a bar. To me, it had nothing to do with the song. After the song had gone out of the charts, they revisited my video and gave it to MTV, after the event. A few years later, Bono said it was his favorite U2 video. At the time, I was disillusioned. I took it personally, after putting so much into it. I thought I'd made an amazing video.

MEIERT AVIS:
Anton Corbijn's a bit northern European for my taste. I know Anton, but his prevailing emotion is
Let's commit suicide
.

 

MARK PELLINGTON:
I'd made a seven-minute video by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, called “Television: The Drug of a Nation.” U2 got turned on to that idea: “Let's attack the media and be self-aware and kind of meta.” They hired me to create videos for their Zoo TV tour.

Bono gave me a David Wojnarowicz photo of a buffalo and said, “Make a piece based on that.” I got some stock footage of buffaloes, blew it up, slowed it down, blew it up more, and blurred it. I think the thing took forty-five minutes. “Okay, slow it down. Slow it down more.”

U2 were like family to me. Not having the band in the video was, at that time, pretty radical. Mine was so slow that people were complaining it wasn't a video. Then they made the third video for “One,” which I call “the Heineken video,” with Bono in the bar.

 

PAUL McGUINNESS:
Mark's video featured buffalos throwing themselves over a cliff. It was a fine piece of work. But it was somewhat short on what we need in a video, which is imagery of the band.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
Like Sting, the camera loves Bono. He's prepared to try anything—I've had him falling out of cars, writhing around on the ground, wearing a silly hat. He is a musical actor.

 

PAUL McGUINNESS:
Bono's a performer, and over the years he's seen enough film of himself that he didn't like to put some effort into understanding the process. He knows about lenses, he knows about timing, he knows how to connect with the camera. He shares with Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger that intuitive ability to connect. All the singers I know—Mick, Bono, Sting—are extraordinary mimics. The singer gene seems to be the same as the mimicry gene. I had lunch with Mick Jagger and Bono, and they were talking about Bob Dylan, who they both know well, and they started to perform competing versions of Bob. I was the only audience for this, and they were both brilliant.

 

SAMMY HAGAR, Van Halen:
I was tired of writing cheap sex songs. Eddie and I wanted to get serious and talk about world issues. “Right Now” was the best lyric I'd ever written for Van Halen. The treatment for the video was bullshit: “Right now, Sammy's looking in the mirror and licking the milk off his mustache,” or something. I told the director, “Fuck you, man. People ain't even going to be listening to what I'm singing because they're going to be reading these subtitles.” I thought,
How dare they?
People probably don't know this: I refused to do the video.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
Because of the lyric of the song, we wanted something that was a little more meaningful than the usual party stuff. I was really proud of that video.

 

JOHN BEUG:
The video I'm probably proudest of is Van Halen's “Right Now.” A commercial director and copywriter named Mark Fenske came up with the concept. The band didn't understand what we were doing. Sammy Hagar didn't want the video to come out. He said, “How dare you put type on top of my lyrics.” He finally relented and “Right Now” won Video of the Year at the 1992 VMAs.

 

SAMMY HAGAR:
Mo Ostin, the chairman of Warner Bros. Records, called me personally when he heard I hated it. He goes, “Sammy, this is going to be the biggest video you've ever had.” I go, “You're crazy. This stinks.” I didn't want to talk about it, so I took my girlfriend—who's now my wife—and we flew off to Kiawah, South Carolina. No one knew where I was.

 

MARK FENSKE, director:
I'd written and produced a few TV commercials that used type on the screen. The record company was scrambling to get a video done. I doubt they'd have given me a shot except for that. When I met the band in a hotel room the night before the shoot, Sammy said, “I can't argue with this guy, look at him.” I'm six-four and 250 pounds. If he was unhappy, I didn't see it. But I was busy and nervous enough to not have noticed a lot of things. It was my first music video. And I'd brought my mother into town, to be the actress in one of the shots.

We didn't have much money or time. Except for Van Halen, every person you see in the video worked on the crew or, in my mother's case, was related to me. For the idea of a girl setting fire to a guy's photo, I had a photo of me at twenty-four that I didn't mind burning.

 

SAMMY HAGAR:
I had pneumonia and a 104-degree temperature. When you see me in the video folding my arms, refusing to lip-sync, it's because I was pissed off. The director's going, “Oh, that's great!” When I slammed the door into the dressing room at the end of the video, that was for real. I was pissed off.

I don't think “Right Now” is a great video at all. It was groundbreaking and interesting, but the look and the feel didn't do much for me. I don't think it's enough about the band.

 

MARK FENSKE:
When “Right Now” won Video of the Year, I didn't know whether or not I should go up to the podium, so I didn't. Music videos are that kind of gig. It's someone else's music, and all you're doing is adding a visual or a context for the song, so it's probably best to not overvalue your contribution.

I brought my mom as my date to the VMAs. While I was staring at the girls from En Vogue, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers walked past us. My mom leaned over to me and said, “That man is only wearing underpants.”

 

 

 

THE THIRD WAVE OF VJs WERE YOUNGER THAN THEIR
predecessors and had more success in their post-MTV careers. Karyn Bryant joined the network right after graduating from an Ivy League college, then worked for TBS, CNN, TNT, ESPN, and MMA. Dan Cortese, a hunky ex–college quarterback, was promoted from production assistant to host of
MTV Sports
, which led to roles on
Melrose Place
and
Seinfeld
. Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, known as Kennedy, was hired when she was nineteen and debuted in September 1992. She says she began receiving hate mail “like the second week I was on the air,” likely because of her brash wisecracking, but possibly because she declared herself to be both a virgin and a young Republican. “Dear Kennedy, you disgust me greatly . . .” began a letter she posted on her office door. Nonetheless, she lasted six years at MTV.

Steve Isaacs was an LA singer/songwriter, and after a brief but influential stint at MTV, he played in a band with Dave Navarro and Stephen Perkins of Jane's Addiction, then became a Web site designer and creative director for digital media. Karen Duffy, a quick-witted model and nursing-home recreational therapist, snuck in digs at Bryan Adams's complexion, and even the viewing audience (“MTV—we play the classics because you fear the unfamiliar”). She was named to
People
magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People list, had a film career that lasted from
Reality Bites
to
Fantastic Mr. Fox
, and wrote a best-selling book about living with sarcoidosis, a potentially fatal autoimmune disorder.