Greetings, Videots!

Apologies from all of us here on the deck of the VIDEO! Cruiser — we realize it’s been far too long since we sent a transmission back from the 1980th Dimension. Not that it’s any excuse, really, but we stumbled across the leftover Cuervo and cocaine from Toto’s “Rosanna” video shoot, and things got a little hairy around here for awhile. We’re okay now, though, and to prove it, we’ve dug up a bona fide ‘classic’ to watch with all of you.

Picture it: the year is 1986. You are Lionel Richie, and you have conquered the pop charts, both as an occasionally too-sensitive member of a tremendous funk group and a solo artist/purveyor of syrupy, impossible to forget adult contemporary ballads. You’ve followed up your successful tenure in the Commodores with a pair of best-selling solo albums. What should you do — what can you do, really — for your third act?

If you answered “find out just how stupid a Top Five single can get,” then you have our condolences, because you clearly remember today’s dried-up mound, “Dancing on the Ceiling.” Here, one of the most prolific songwriters of the early ’80s managed to pee all over the memory of a classic Fred Astaire dance routine while simultaneously rivaling “Who’s Johnny?” as the most substance-free hit of the year. With that title and these lyrics, the only way the video could have been worse is if Richie had filled it with people dressed like Meshach Taylor in Mannequin and made them jump around like idiots.

Oh. Wait.

Call the paramedics! This man has been eaten by a couch!

In Richie’s defense, he’s an extremely talented songwriter, one whose gift for easy hooks and MOR tempos made him a perfect fit for the early-to-mid ’80s — and by the time Dancing on the Ceiling was recorded, he’d been keeping up a difficult pace for a number of years, so it isn’t surprising that exhaustion crept into the album. On the other hand, “Dancing on the Ceiling” is awful.

Once again, CAPTAIN VIDEO! is flabbergasted by the number of people it took to write a song — in this case, the not-so-magic number is three. Three people! To produce a finished product that includes the words “Oh, what a feeling / When we’re dancing on the ceiling,” repeated approximately 40,000 times! Clearly, there was some mighty fine Colombian swirling around the studio when this “song” was “written” — and speaking of nose candy, why, let’s take a look at the video!

The clip opens with an exterior shot of a swanky highrise apartment building, then cuts to Lionel, his guitarist, and his white-gloved drummer walking down a hallway. Lionel is walking backwards and jabbering about what a great party they’re going to have — and what do you know? He’s right!

And this isn’t just any party, either — it’s a KEYTAR party!

And what would a keytar party be without a lot of terrible, terrible dancing? Observe two classic moves:

The “I’m holding up a building while doing a one-armed windmill”!

The “Where did my dignity go?”

Here’s the video’s first money shot, which was greeted with a chorus of oohs and ahhs from people who couldn’t figure out how in the world Lionel managed to actually dance on a ceiling. (CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s favorite comment on this clip’s YouTube page reads as follows: “FAKE! They aren’t really dancing on the ceiling! Really they’re just walking across it.”)

Speaking of fake, here’s a shot of Lionel with two of his band members. That blond-haired ponytailed fellow to Lionel’s left is the drummer, and he spends the entire clip either smacking his sticks together or hitting them against the air. While wearing white gloves.

And speaking of gloves, here’s a rare sighting of a creature not seen since 1986, or the last outdoor funk festival in Minsk: the gloved bassist!

It was here, for the first but by no means the last time, that Cheech regretted breaking up with Chong.

How did a black man break the color barrier at MTV in the early ’80s? By tricking the bitches into thinking he might be gay. Nicely done, Lionel! You so smooth.

Just in case you forgot, this is a KEYTAR party!

…And finally, what would an expensive ’80s video be without a perfectly unnecessary cameo from Rodney Dangerfield? (Bonus fun fact: this is what Rodney was talking about when, after filming Ladybugs, he told people he’d “done worse.”)

So there you have it, faithful Videots — the sights and sounds of Lionel Richie scraping the bottom of his creative barrel so thoroughly that he wouldn’t release another album of new material for a decade. He’s released a string of records since 1996, but none of them have come anywhere near the sales levels of his first three solo albums — which is why his most recent release, 2007’s Live in Paris, sticks a six-and-a-half-minute version of “Dancing on the Ceiling” third on the setlist. He may have co-written and recorded one of the dumbest songs of the ’80s, but we’re the dopes who turned it into a hit. As always, Lionel is laughing all the way to the bank.

Greetings, Videots!

Time gets a little funny out here in the 1980th Dimension, but it feels like it’s been awhile since we turned on the projector and marveled at what once passed for entertainment, so why don’t we do that now? Let’s just turn this thing on and set it to random…

Crap! It’s Loverboy!

Yes, Videots, today’s exhibition comes courtesy of Canada’s headband-rockin’ answer to REO Speedwagon. At the time of this video’s release, Loverboy was one of the biggest bands in rock & roll, riding high on a string of four consecutive platinum (or multi-platinum) albums, all of which sucked something awful. (Say what you will — CAPTAIN VIDEO! refuses to believe that even Loverboy’s best songs have ever had anything but camp value. If you can listen to “Workin’ for the Weekend” without snickering at least once, please turn yourself in to the nearest member of Nickelback.)

By the mid-’80s, however, signs of wear and tear were beginning to show. Audiences were tiring of the band’s formula, and most of its biggest hits after ‘83 were soundtrack ballads — specifically “Heaven in Your Eyes,” from Top Gun, and the stunningly mawkish “Almost Paradise” from Footloose, which is technically a Mike Reno duet with Ann Wilson, but seeing as how no one could have picked the rest of the band out of a lineup even at the height of its fame, we’ll count it here. The point is: Loverboy was running out of gas.

To be fair, the band had been touring basically nonstop for years, and despite what Steven Tyler and will tell you, there are really only so many songs a person can write about hot chicks. In retrospect, if Loverboy had called it quits after 1985’s Lovin’ Every Minute Of It, they probably would have gone down as something more than a goofy relic. Alas and alack, the band rolled the dice for Album Number Five, and came up with a 40-pound turkey called Wildside.

Today’s video is the leadoff single from that horrible album, an oh-so-’80s number titled “Notorious.” Normally, CAPTAIN VIDEO! breaks these clips down for you, highlighting the most ridiculous moments for maximum mockery, but that’s impossible with the “Notorious” video, mainly because it represents one of the early peaks of the epilepsy-inducing fascination with micro-jump cuts that gripped the industry toward the end of the decade. Taken out of context, all of this video’s ingredients are non-toxic, even if they were totally played out long before the clip was released; it’s only when you mix them together that the nauseating fumes threaten to overpower you.

If the “Notorious” video has a saving grace, it’s the fact that it was directed by none other than a pre-Se7en David Fincher, who, even this early in his career, had the good sense to limit shots of the band to 10% of the video (and light them from behind half the time). Although Mike Reno had yet to begin his campaign to eat the contents of every bakery in North America, Fincher knew that nobody in the band was pretty enough to compete with closeup shots of scantily clad models doing phone booth stripteases. If you are old enough to have requested this when it was in heavy rotation on MTV, it is now time to fess up: You didn’t call in because you were a fan of the band.

And it certainly couldn’t have been that you liked the song. CAPTAIN VIDEO! understands that taste is subjective, and remembers well the synth-glutted lunacy that was the mid-to-late ’80s — but come on. “Notorious”? It kicks off with a blast of noise that sounds like a cabinet full of synthesizers in an earthquake, and goes downhill from there, offering the listener such AOR bon mots as “Little girl, don’t you hesitate / ‘Cause you’re usin’…live bait! / Senorita, solitaire / You got a certain kind of savoir faire.”

Awful. Just awful. The worst part — or best part, depending on how dark your sense of humor is — is that it took five people to write “Notorious,” including the deans emeritus of retard rock, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. (Given how skillfully they’d take the whole synths-and-gang-vocals shtick to the top of the charts with “Bad Medicine” a year later, it seems obvious that “Notorious” was a warm-up exercise of sorts.) CAPTAIN VIDEO! repeats: Five people. Gentle Videots, “Notorious” is hardly even a song — were you to try and perform it on acoustic guitar or piano, it would collapse, like a souffle made of poop, flop sweat, and cocaine.

Collapsing, incidentally, is exactly what the band’s career proceeded to do. Wildside went gold somehow, but the band had had enough, and called it quits prior to the late ‘89 release of the contract-fulfilling best-of compilation, Big Ones. They’ve since reunited, of course — their most recent release, the optimistically titled Just Getting Started, came out just last year (and God as CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s witness, it really isn’t half bad). They’ll never again scale the commercial heights they reached in the ’80s, but — as this video attests — that isn’t necessarily a bad thing:

Greetings, Videots! Due to unforeseen circumstances, Scraps had to bail out on this week’s Name That Tune, so we’ll be taking a special trip to the 1980th dimension instead. Buckle up!

As you all know, New Orleans has been in the news quite a bit over the last few years, what with disasters natural (the hurricane) and man-made (heckuva job, Brownie!). But it’s important to remember that the city has a long, proud tradition of weathering terrible storms. Musical ones, even. Particularly during the ’80s.

We are talking, of course, about Louisiana’s LeRoux.

They’re something of a blues-club circuit standby now, but if you aren’t a student of Cajun blues or ’80s AOR, you may not have ever heard of Louisiana’s LeRoux — so we should probably spend a little time retracing the band’s fascinating, often unintentionally hilarious career.

The group was formed in the late ’70s by guitarist and singer Jeff Pollard — in fact, it was originally called the Jeff Pollard Band — and spent a few years bumming around the Capitol Records roster as a bayou-flavored rock band, spinning off minor hits like “New Orleans Ladies” and “Nobody Said It Was Easy,” before being dropped in 1980.

Shortening their name to LeRoux, the group soldiered on to RCA, where they eked out another record before Pollard quit, taking percussionist/flautist/trumpet player Bobby Campo with him. Now, it’s important to pause here and underscore what we’re talking about: The departure of the guy who not only started the band, but initially named it after himself. LeRoux should have been LeDone, right?

But no. This was the ’80s, people! No one cared about Louisiana gumbo, but there was money to be made in bland, immaculately polished rock & roll! Onward and downward, Rouxsters!

All they needed was a singer and songwriter who could take them far, far away from their musical past — hopefully stripping them of all their credibility in the process — and they got him in the form of Dennis “Fergie” Frederiksen.

(The lone Toto fan in the audience just screamed, “Oh, shit! It’s Fergie!”)

Frederiksen, like LeRoux, has a fascinating (and often unintentionally hilarious) story. Before attaching himself like an anchor to LeRoux, he was a solo artist named David London. Take it away, Wikipedia:

“As David London, Frederiksen released a music video, ‘Samantha,’ that appeared as a video interlude on HBO and on USA network’s Video Concert Hall. This song was also on the soundtrack of the Village People movie Can’t Stop the Music.”

This isn’t entirely accurate — Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner deserve just as much of the blame for Can’t Stop the Music as the Village People — but it gets the important part of the message across, which is that the Ferg was deeply committed to becoming a star.

In LeRoux, der Fergster probably saw the chance to be the band’s own version of Michael McDonald, overhauling their musical direction while earning them buckets and buckets of money before embarking on the inevitable solo career. As you’ve no doubt already realized, he only accomplished the first part of that goal, and the video evidence of said “accomplishment” is what we’re here to discuss today.

Gentle Videots, CAPTAIN VIDEO! brings you LeRoux’s 1983 “hit” “Carrie’s Gone.” Like many terrible ’80s videos, this one begins with a shot of a car that no one in the band could possibly afford:

And a house none of them would have been allowed inside:

Of course, this guy totally belongs in here. Just look at his suit. (No, seriously, look at it. CAPTAIN VIDEO! is convinced it’s the only reason we’re supposed to dislike the person wearing it.)

What’s he looking for? Come on, Videots. Don’t play dumb. You know he’s looking for Carrie…and you know Carrie’s gone!

Now, if you’ve ever heard “Carrie’s Gone,” you know there are plenty of musical reasons to dislike the song — the rhythm guitar that even Mel Bay would laugh at, the crappy synth, the Energizer drums — but this marks the spot where we meet the real villain of the story. The whole point of the song, and the video, is to give Frederiksen the chance to thumb his nose at his girlfriend’s vanquished paramour. He even shows up in her note:

Seriously, what a dick:

And as if taunting the guy he’s just cuckolded on paper isn’t enough, the little twerp shows up in his house. His house!

And what does the Fergburglar have to offer Carrie? Well, just take a look at his idea of a romantic evening:

At this point, our jiltee shows up at LeHovel, presumably to snap the annoying little mulleted pipsqueak in half.

Unfortunately, the Dutchess brought backup:

Even after being confronted with all that muscle, Suit Guy makes a move, and true to form, our little Farrah Fawcett wannabe vanishes into thin air, reappearing on a fire escape. He can disappear, he can teleport, he’s fucking annoying — Fergie Frederiksen is like a corporate rock version of Mr. Mytzlplyk.

By now, any sane man would just give up and let Carrie have the little dingleberry, but our guy persists. It’s anyone’s guess as to why. Maybe in her note, Carrie told Mr. Suit that she was leaving him for another woman, and he’s trying to tell her she’s made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, the world will never know — we go from a shot of Suit climbing up the fire escape to a LeRoux concert. Dig the keytar!

It doesn’t really end here — there are a few more shots of Carrie’s ex haplessly pursuing her — but since Fergie never receives the beating he so richly deserves, there’s no reason to bother going over the video’s last two minutes. It certainly isn’t as if the song goes anywhere.

Fergie, though? He was going places. Not long after this album was released, Frederiksen replaced Bobby Kimball in Toto — CAPTAIN VIDEO! assumes he called Kimball repeatedly, singing “Toto’s gone” into the phone and hanging up — taking over the vocals for 1984’s Isolation, an album so bland it makes vanilla taste like habanero.

After Isolation tanked, Fergie was finally exiled to the rock & roll margins, where he remains to this day, performing with something called the World Classic Rockers (don’t fucking ask) between doing benefit shows for the American Liver Foundation in order to bring awareness to hepatitis C, which he contracted at some point, probably from Carrie. (What? Too soon?)

LeRoux, for its part, reunited in the late ’90s, and has done an impressive job of re-reinventing itself as a Cajun boogie band — they tour like madmen, and have recently worked as backing musicians for Tab Benoit. CAPTAIN VIDEO! hasn’t seen a recent setlist, but it seems altogether unlikely that the group is performing, or thinking about, “Carrie’s Gone” these days. Fortunately, we still have the video, which you can “enjoy” below.

That’s all for now, Videots — see you in a month!

Greetings, Videots!

Apologies for the long delay between transmissions, but apparently, some strange things were afoot at Mission Control — the S.S. M.T.V. wasn’t able to raise anyone at the home base for months. It seems as though everything’s back up and running now, so if you’ve got the stomach for it, let’s see what dreaded beast we’ve been able to drag out of the 1980th Dimension this month, shall we?

Fuck! It’s Air Supply!

CAPTAIN VIDEO! will understand if you want to run now, Videots — this could get ugly in a hurry. First of all, Air Supply sucks; second, Air Supply videos suck; and third, where Air Supply songs and videos go, dozens of impassioned housewives inevitably follow. In other words, we might very well soon be pelted with granny panties and harsh words from Airheads all over the Web.

Are you still with us? Are you sure? Okay, let’s get this party started. Well, not a party, really; we are talking about “Making Love Out of Nothing At All,” after all. More like a sunset walk on the beach. (A beach littered with Members Only jackets and high-pitched wailing, but still.)

“Making Love Out of Nothing At All” was part of Air Supply’s seemingly interminable early ’80s hot streak, arriving between “Two Less Lonely Eunuchs People in the World” and “Just As I Am.” Interestingly enough, the song wasn’t originally intended for the Australian Russells — Jim Steinman wrote it for Meat Loaf’s Midnight at the Lost and Found album, but legal squabbles left Meat “Making Love”-less, and the rest is mellow, mellow history.

And really, the drop from Mr. Loaf to Air Supply really isn’t very steep. Steinman’s songs are uniformly ridiculous, over the top, and unavoidably catchy; all they need is a singer with a big range and the ability to oversell line after line of shockingly stupid lyrics. Russell Hitchcock, come on down!

CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s favorite lines might be these — but it’s so hard to choose:

I can make the runner stumble
I can make the final block
And I can make every tackle at the sound of the whistle
I can make all the stadiums rock

Rock? Really? Because we…well, never mind. Let’s move on to this terrible, terrible video.

Even nestled among the other jewels in the Air Supply crown, the “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” video is really something special, because it adds bad acting to the mix. Blessed with a string of hits, the Russells did what everyone else with a decent video budget was doing in the early ’80s — namely, trying to make a mini-movie to go along with their song. This one starts off with a string of unintentionally hilarious scenes between Graham Russell (looking for all the world like a miniature Larry Bird) and some chippie who’s clearly too young for him. With all the passion and urgency of a cashier counting out pennies, Russell “pleads” with his girl to join him on the road (he starts off with “So, won’t you reconsider?”), telling her he can give her anything.

Her response, natch, is “All I want is you.” CAPTAIN VIDEO! would ordinarily assume this poor woman has some sort of severe mental handicap, but since she’s the one driving to the airport, that’s out of the question. Maybe she was just after his money. Anyway, Graham leans in for a kiss on the tarmac, she pushes him away, and then the fun begins:

Which one’s the microphone?

Pull the camera back! BACK!

Early on, the video’s director proves he’s just as subtle as Steinman, timing the shot below — in which Graham stares longingly at a picture of his baby back home while a bored-looking groupie rolls over next to him — with the lines “I know just how to fake it / And I know just how to scheme”:

Followed by this shot, of our rakishly unbuttoned hero looking sad on the plane, thus underscoring that he didn’t really want to bone that groupie. If only his selfish bitch of a girlfriend had been willing to join him on the road:

All the while, Russell Hitchcock is screeching like a castrato with his ass on fire. And on and on it goes — dull performance footage, painfully squidgy “acting” by Graham, pictures moving in frames — for over five fucking minutes. (Steinman never met a three-minute song he couldn’t stuff with an extra couple hundred seconds’ worth of lard.)

The song goes on for so long, in fact, that Graham’s girl has time to pack her bag, hit the road, change her mind, and high-tail it to the gig, where she sashays past security and plants this groin-melting look on him:

Bored groupies behind him once more, Graham meets his lady beneath a strategically placed laser lightshow:

Making love truly out of nothing at all. The song went all the way to Number Two, which makes perfect sense in a world where According to Jim is entering its seventh season. It’s lonely in space, but at least this video was never a hit out here:

That’s all for now, Videots! Meet you back in the 1980th Dimension next month!

Greetings, Videots!

CAPTAIN VIDEO! apologizes for running out on you so quickly during our last session together, but we had a bit of a commotion here on the ship’s bridge. After years of searching, you see, we finally tracked down a prized and most foul relic of the ’80s: Hard video evidence of Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.”

Some explanation might be in order for those of you who are perhaps not completely familiar with the 1980th Dimension, and have therefore gone through life blissfully assuming that “25 or 6 to 4″ is a cool, trippy artifact of the late ’60s and nothing more. CAPTAIN VIDEO! is sad to inform you that this is not the case. In point of fact, an atrocious cover of the song was released in 1986, complete with nonsensical video. Who covered it? Why, Chicago, of course!

From a certain point of view, it’s difficult not to forgive the band its efforts to huff the fumes of past glories, no matter how misguided; they’d just lost their original bassist, de facto lead singer, and lately chief songwriter, Peter Cetera, and Cetera’s departure came after a pair of ballad-weighted albums bearing very little relation to their early work. The band was at a crossroads, in other words, and it’s easy to imagine the members of Chicago conceiving this cover as a sort of trial balloon that might float them up, up and away from dreck like “Hard to Say I’m Sorry.” (Of course, it’s just as easy to imagine producer David Foster getting tired of hearing the horn section banging on the studio door he padlocked shut during Chicago 16, and deciding to throw them a three-minute bone.)

Either way, the key to the whole thing was recording something that did not suck — something Chicago either forgot or willfully ignored, because the 1986 version of “25 or 6 to 4″ is a double serving of crappy. Imagine rock music is a city, if you will — and then imagine that city being attacked by a giant robot made of synthesizers. The robot is too clumsy to do any real damage, but it can’t take a step without dropping a Casio turd on a rock & roll memory.

This is “25 or 6 to 4.”

The video, like re-recording the song in the first place, makes little sense; it’s two parts “Max Headroom”-style dystopian future and one part performance video, with a light frosting of cocaine. The plot, such as it is, has something to do with a high school attended by kids who look older than Ian Ziering in the last season of 90210, their authoritarian headmasters, and a glass horse.

CAPTAIN VIDEO! shits you not. In fact, because this video really needs to be taken in as a whole to be fully appreciated, let’s do away with the screenshots this time around, and just watch it front to back:

Of course, a great number of this era’s videos made no sense, so if “25 or 6 to 4″ had been a radio hit, the video probably would have gone into heavy rotation. As it turned out, listeners didn’t cotton to new Chicago basist Jason Scheff’s adenoidal wailing of a song they fondly remembered, the remake stalled outside the Top 40, and the band quickly returned to releasing goopy ballads. (Interesting side note: Though the original is credited solely to pianist Robert Lamm, trombone player James Pankow got a co-write on the remake, presumably due to a last-minute effort by a horrified Lamm to distance himself from the recording.)

And with that, dear Videots, we’re off into the 1980th Dimension once more! Meet you here next month for more video goodness!

Doesn’t he look brave?

CAPTAIN VIDEO! will periodically drop by to act as our guide through the Music Videos of the 1980s. You may have met him already — he’s been around for awhile, over at Blogger — but he likes it better here. You’ll notice he has his own shiny new category, over on the left, where all the old favorites have been assembled for your reading enjoyment.

Be on the lookout for new CAPTAIN VIDEO! soon!

Rock has been driven underground.

The authorities stalk pirate broadcasters and their followers.

Those who are apprehended suffer severe consequences.

Hey, kid! What are you doing? Haven’t you heard? Rock has been driven underground! Knock it off already with your rocking out–in public, no less! You don’t want to suffer severe consequences, do you?

Oh, shit! It’s the Rock Police! You’re really in for it now–don’t say we didn’t warn you…

Oh my God! They totally broke your boom box!

The Rock Police are gonna take you downtown…

(Meanwhile, across town, the rock freedom fighters in KEEL — God bless ‘em — are reminding you that you’ve got the right to rock!)

Man, did you see that? That kid just blew up the Rock Police Paddywagon with a firecracker!

Run, kid! Run! Fight for your right to rock! Just like KEEL said!

They almost had him, and then — out of fuckin’ nowhere, dude — here comes this motorcycle parade! Looks like a flagrant violation of the Rock Penal Code!

(I think KEEL had something to do with it!)

Hey, what’s that guy on the left doing in here? He’s clearly way too old to rock! I smell a setup, KEEL — you guys had better clear out of there quick!

KEEL ain’t gonna never stop rockin’ for nobody!

Goddammit, KEEL — here comes the fuzz! If you guys get taken in for rocking, who’s gonna keep fighting the good fight?

Holy crap! The power of KEEL’s rocking is electrocuting the Chief of the Rock Police! This is awesome!

YEAH!!! Rock never dies!!!*

*At least, not until a few years later, when Ron Keel, frontman for the shitty metal band KEEL, realized nobody was ever going to buy his crummy rock records and went to Nashville to become Ronnie Lee Keel. And then when that didn’t work, on to reforming KEEL.**

**And then when that didn’t work, he grew a mullet and started a band that would love to be Lynyrd Skynyrd.

CAPTAIN VIDEO! has had a long, grueling trip to the 1980th Dimension this month, and to be perfectly frank, he’s a little tired. Rather than disappointing yon legions of loyal readers by totally punking out, however, I’ve reached into the archives for a video that is so totally, blindingly awful that it requires very little in the way of comment or explanation on my part. Witness:

Yes, it’s Bobby Brown! And not just any Bobby Brown, either! This is “Every Little Step” Bobby Brown!

“Every Little Step” actually starts off well enough. The stark white set contrasts nicely with the black outfits, and the overall effect provides a nice visual complement to the stark efficiency of Teddy Riley’s New Jack beats. Here we have some women in tight, skimpy outfits, which works in any video’s favor.

And then begins the descent into Stupidville.

It’s difficult to tell when one is looking at still photos from the video, but “Every Little Step” truly features some of the most horrible choreography of the era. As a singer, a songwriter, and human being, Bobby Brown has always made a pretty good dancer, so this routine has always been deeply puzzling.

The whole video is full of faces like this one. CAPTAIN VIDEO! forgot to mention that as a lip-syncher, Bobby Brown makes a pretty good dancer.

Nobody over the age of seven should ever wear anything with his name printed on any visible portion of it.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, the most flamboyantly gay segment in the entire history of R&B music video:

Yeah, he tries to come off tough later in the video, but after the red socks/biker shorts/suspenders incident, it isn’t very convincing, is it?

This shot comes from the “rap” portion of the video, specially inserted into the “radio mix” of the song in order to disguise the fact that it consists of one verse and one chorus, repeated for several minutes. How anyone listened to this without laughing is beyond the scope of CAPTAIN VIDEO!s ability to comprehend. In the rap, Bobby promises to “rock stupid rhymes” — likely one of the only promises he’s bothered to keep in his adult life — and finishes by reminding the listener that “My name is Bobby, not Uncle Sam.”

CAPTAIN VIDEO! would be remiss if he did not mention the fact that yes, once upon a time, Bobby Brown showed promise. Many of us believed this was the beginning of a long and interesting career. Why we thought this, exactly, CAPTAIN VIDEO! is presently unable to recall. Regardless, Bobby Brown’s fall from grace in the years since Don’t Be Cruel has been spectacular. It has certainly been more interesting than his music.

How’s that new album coming, Bob? Child support checks on time this month?

CAPTAIN VIDEO! has had a long, grueling trip to the 1980th Dimension this month, and to be perfectly frank, he’s a little tired. Rather than disappointing yon legions of loyal readers by totally punking out, however, I’ve reached into the archives for a video that is so totally, blindingly awful that it requires very little in the way of comment or explanation on my part. Witness:

Yes, it’s Bobby Brown! And not just any Bobby Brown, either! This is “Every Little Step” Bobby Brown!

“Every Little Step” actually starts off well enough. The stark white set contrasts nicely with the black outfits, and the overall effect provides a nice visual complement to the stark efficiency of Teddy Riley’s New Jack beats. Here we have some women in tight, skimpy outfits, which works in any video’s favor.

And then begins the descent into Stupidville.

It’s difficult to tell when one is looking at still photos from the video, but “Every Little Step” truly features some of the most horrible choreography of the era. As a singer, a songwriter, and human being, Bobby Brown has always made a pretty good dancer, so this routine has always been deeply puzzling.

The whole video is full of faces like this one. CAPTAIN VIDEO! forgot to mention that as a lip-syncher, Bobby Brown makes a pretty good dancer.

Nobody over the age of seven should ever wear anything with his name printed on any visible portion of it.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, the most flamboyantly gay segment in the entire history of R&B music video:

Yeah, he tries to come off tough later in the video, but after the red socks/biker shorts/suspenders incident, it isn’t very convincing, is it?

This shot comes from the “rap” portion of the video, specially inserted into the “radio mix” of the song in order to disguise the fact that it consists of one verse and one chorus, repeated for several minutes. How anyone listened to this without laughing is beyond the scope of CAPTAIN VIDEO!s ability to comprehend. In the rap, Bobby promises to “rock stupid rhymes” — likely one of the only promises he’s bothered to keep in his adult life — and finishes by reminding the listener that “My name is Bobby, not Uncle Sam.”

CAPTAIN VIDEO! would be remiss if he did not mention the fact that yes, once upon a time, Bobby Brown showed promise. Many of us believed this was the beginning of a long and interesting career. Why we thought this, exactly, CAPTAIN VIDEO! is presently unable to recall. Regardless, Bobby Brown’s fall from grace in the years since Don’t Be Cruel has been spectacular. It has certainly been more interesting than his music.

How’s that new album coming, Bob? Child support checks on time this month?

My generation has Kenny Loggins.

To be fair, it was actually our parents who brought him his first measure of success, as the “Loggins” in “Loggins & Messina.” But they knew what they were doing–L&M’s recorded output, while slight, managed to stay on the sunny side of the line between breezy and banal more often than not. “Danny’s Song”? “House At Pooh Corner”? “Watching the River Run”? Classics.

But then Loggins & Messina broke up, and Loggins proved all too eager to expose himself as the dippy New Age doofus he’d always been at heart. His first few albums were a terrible blend of ponderous mysticism, mush-brained folk, and soft jazz, from the interminably mawkish music to the artwork that seemed to always feature a soft-focus shot of Kenny–all done up in a velour tunic or something similarly lame–striking a ridiculous pose against a backdrop of, say, the universe.

That was bad enough. But then the ’80s dawned, and he discovered two things:
1. He wanted to rock.
2. Synthesizers.

This led to a series of albums, each progressively dumber than its predecessors, on which Loggins managed to pan sacks full of chart gold out of a stream of inane, overproduced drivel masquerading as rock & roll. My generation ate it up–we’re the kids who sent “Footloose” to Number One–and we’ve never had to pay for it. One day, however, we will have to explain the terrifying success of Kenny Loggins to our children. CAPTAIN VIDEO! does not look forward to that day.

CAPTAIN VIDEO! certainly will not show today’s video to his curious tykes. “I’m Free (Heaven Help the Man)” represents three terrible musical artifacts from the 1980s–one, it’s a hit Kenny Loggins song from a motion picture soundtrack; two, the portion of the title within parentheses is longer than the portion without; three, in the video, the singer pretends to be an action hero.

This last annoyance was always ridiculous enough when the singer in question was just a simpering soft-rock balladeer (like Peter Cetera in Chicago’s “Along Comes A Woman” video). But Kenny Loggins has never, in looks or musical essence, given the appearance of someone who would be able to put up a convincing fight against a stiff breeze or a six-year-old girl, let alone a non-quadraplegic adult human being.

And that brings us to the crux of this video’s shittiness: It asks us to accept Kenny Loggins as an escaped convict.

He’s on the run! What did he do to wind up in prison?

Isn’t it obvious? He’s a rebel!

No fence can hold him–especially not when these handy fence-snippers are standard issue for all the inmates!

Will he be able to snip fast enough to get out before George and Stanley find out he’s missing?

In the nick of time, he uses his ninja hippie powers to escape detection!

And…here’s where things get really lame.

Knowing that Kenny Loggins made the least convincing street tough since that time Richie Cunningham wore Fonzie’s jacket on Happy Days, the director had two choices: Ignore it, and try to make everything else as believable as possible, or just bring all the other gangsters in the video down to Kenny’s level.

Guess which option was chosen:

Yes, believe it or not, Poindexter here is the leader of the pack. What kind of town is this? Do the cops even bother carrying weapons? Could the crew keep straight faces while watching the filming of this scene, in which Kenny and Poindexter engage in “macho” posturing that leaves them both seemingly on the verge of tears?

Of course, Kenny’s come back for his girl. She lives with her parents and doesn’t look to be more than sixteen years old. Kenny, on the other hand, probably left home when Lyndon Johnson was President. Here is where the video turns creepy and crappy.

Ma: What did she say, George? What did she say?
Pa: She’s run off with that damn goodfornothin’!

Pa: (thinks to self) He won’t get far. Can’t run too far on that freak vegan diet of his. I’ll just wait at the county line with a bag of granola and flush him out.

Yep. That’s what I’ll do.

Of course, Pa doesn’t need to go to the county line–the cops have the lovebirds cornered on top of a building in a matter of minutes. Kenny stands around and makes a series of stupid faces while the girl screams and sobs. Looks like it’s back to the hoosegow for Kenny, until who should have a change of heart but…

Yes! It’s Poindexter to the rescue!

On his signal, the town’s troubled, misunderstood youth descend upon the cops, who have no idea what to do. Kenny and his child bride escape. The old ladies in the background clasp their hands to their bosoms and swoon.

This video wasn’t the dumbest thing Kenny Loggins did in the ’80s–that honor belongs to either “Meet Me Halfway” or his naked wedding to his enema therapist–but it comes close. Painfully close.