A group of young teen girls are having a slumber party. They’re each holding what appear to be reasonably-sized sandwiches, and are poised to take their first bites.
But Mom strides into the room brandishing a copy of People Magazine. She orders the girls to wait before they eat, then opens the magazine and exhorts them to first read an article “about what it means for a woman to grow up fat in America”. The not-even-vaguely-fat girls all reluctantly lower their sandwiches to their laps. To comfort them, Mom continues, “And when you’re done, you can read this cover story about The Who!”
“The Who!” and “Roger Daltrey!” the girls scream, as they explode in squeals and giggles.
…
I don’t know if any decade hated girls more than the ‘80s.
I kinda got into The Stones back around the time they released Steel Wheels, but to be honest, I was always more of a Beatles kid. (Or to be even more honest, I was an Eagles kid.) I appreciated both, but their heydays were a little before my time, so I never developed incredibly strong opinions about their discographies or their musicianship.
But all things considered, why’d Charlie have to go while we’re still stuck with asshole septuagenarians like Clapton and Ted Nugent?
Someone please seal Mick, Keith, Paul, and Ringo in a comfy panic room for the next few years.
It is strangely jarring listening to the girls on Love Island sing the ABC song.
“…cue are ess, tee you vee, double-you ecks, why and ZED” is like a slap to the ears. It’s like getting to the end of a novel and finding the last chapter has been swapped out with a recipe for Spam fritters.
Thank you, Love Island, for exposing me to this Kanye cover by Dermot Kennedy.
Long before Lil Nas X gave a lapdance to Satan and made the Fox News crowd clutch its pearls, people were making Very Gay Music Videos. Not just the usual suspects like Culture Club, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, or Queen… heterosexual Teen Beat megastars like Duran Duran frequently made videos that spent more time focusing on Simon Le Bon’s pout or Nick Rhodes’ makeup than the, ahem… Girls On Film. From today’s perspective, it looks a bit like queerbaiting, but my sense is that it was mostly down to the convergence of rock’s then-common love of hairspray/guyliner and the efforts of queer video directors to make an impact in what was an ostensibly hyper-masculine musical space.
And then there’s Billy Squier’s Rock Me Tonite.
Squier was on a roll in the early ‘80s, with lots of radio airplay and arena gigs… he and bands like Loverboy were delivering power-pop decades before Fallout Boy came to town, and his primary legacy remains a timeless song that every stripper in America was obligated to use for the next twenty years: The Stroke.
But it was still early days in music video creation —Martin Scorcese, David Fincher, and company hadn’t yet brought their talents to the table— and time/budget/vision was frequently lacking. So for some reason, a young Kenny “High School Musical” Ortega got the nod to slap something together for Squier’s next big hit.
And, well… the results are at the top of this post.
Ortega is understandably defensive about it to this day… the video is widely believed to have murdered Squier’s career —which was largely dependent upon the enthusiasm of cishet teen boys— and no director wants to believe his three minutes of infamy did so much damage. And to be sure, it’s not all on him… after all, Ortega’s a choreographer, and whatever flailing nonsense Squier is doing in the video could not have possibly been conceived by a fully-engaged professional. Also, a couple years later, Squier decided to lean in to the whole thing and do a duet with Freddie Mercury that would serve as the last gasp of his stardom.
(Granted, it was years before HIV forced Freddie to come out, so it’s possible Squier had no clue about the potential associations, but c’mon… the nature of Mercury’s sexuality was an even more open secret than Elton John’s.)
Still, the consensus among those in the know is that watching Squier prance around in pastels while writhing on the floor shirtless and playing a pink guitar alienated the overwhelming majority of his fanbase, but I don’t think that alone would have done it. It’s not just the content: it’s how fucking awful and amateurish the whole thing turned out.
Ortega put on a master-class in 80’s editing cliches —the shirt-ripping freeze-frame, for fuck’s sake!— that would have looked ridiculous even if he’d butched-up the production with explosions and dead-eyed dancing girls in bikinis. Most videos of the era were bad in a variety of ways, but the man somehow managed to incorporate them all into one piece of work that I don’t think counts as queerbaiting simply because no self-respecting homosexual would look at such a tacky, tasteless mess and think, “Mmm, gimme some of that!”
The world is a better, more accepting place today, of course. But I’d like to think it would still reject a turd like Rock Me Tonite, no matter how much pink was poured over it.
The American and British versions of Married At First Sight always looked awful, so I ignored them. But when we started watching Australian Gogglebox and saw how insane those people went every year when MAFS came around, I figured there might be something interesting going on.
And there is. MAFS Australia may be the most finely-tuned engine of interpersonal dysfunction ever created. Unlike the other versions of the show, the producers Down Under make only an occasional effort to create successful love-matches… at least half the time, they’re intentionally putting people together to create explosive, toxic interactions. And they are really fucking good at it.
I mean, there’s no scenario where anyone thought Bryce and Melissa were a good fit, except in the sense that he’s an instinctive predator, and she’s a practiced victim. There was only one way things could have played out with them… he was negging her within 72 hours, brazenly manipulating her abandonment issues shortly thereafter, and when his personality couldn’t withstand contact with reality, gaslighting the hell out of her. And Melissa, in turn, did exactly what she was expected to do… fall for it with the desperate, pathetic passion of a love-lorn spinster.
The gross/fascinating thing about Bryce is that he’s so confidently stupid about his nature… there is something disturbingly Trumpian in the way he leverages the tools of abuse in a way that’s purposeful but also instinctive. It’s not as if he has some sophisticated plan undergirding his behavior… if he’d had a few extra brain cells to work with, he wouldn’t have been so obvious from the get-go.
I swear, this show can be depressingly educational, if only by accident.
