I particularly love the menus on this set, wonderful funky beats playing out on multiple fluorescent flickering screens whilst spinning around blueprints of a geodesic-style dome! Whilst the kaiju fighting intercut with the Beastie Boys vogueing their way through packed train stations is great in the
official video, this has actually reminded me that my favourite music video of the whole set has to the alternate remix and angle of the Intergalactic track: it is a bit fiddly but select the 'platform' angle and the
Prisoners of Technology remix for some ambience over arriving and departing Japanese commuter trains all filmed at different speeds! That combination works incredibly well!
I know that people really like the Spike Jonze video for
Sabotage a lot, but its a bit too shouty for me and I'm pretty over the aesthetic now that we've had lots of 70s cop show style comic antics from the Starsky & Hutch remake to The Nice Guys since then (it appears that the first to capitalise on the post-Sabotage resurgence of interest in cheesy 70s cops was that Australian series
Funky Squad!)
Out of the videos on the set I particularly like:
- the stock footaged
Something's Got To Give, probably because I am already partial to that method with the wonderful (mostly NASA) stock footage transformed into music videos series
The Trip (someone
really needs to clear the rights and get The Trip out on disc somewhere!).
-
Looking Down The Barrel of a Gun, with its fish-eye lens look is pretty iconic
-
The Fatboy Slim remix of Body Movin' does a great homage to Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik! (I'm pretty certain to be voting for this during the music video list project)
- The transformation of concert footage into free flowing art in the
Shadrach video is really great at conveying a sense of energy and flow
- And at the opposite end
Three MCs and One DJ is stripped back to just the performance.
Of course there are a couple of big videos missing from the set, in particular
(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party), directed by Ric Menello, later screenwriter of a couple of James Gray films, Two Lovers and The Immigrant! The video that made a generation of parents upset at these uncouth youths throwing custard pies about the place and endorsing pre-marital sex! The other missing big one is
No Sleep Till Brooklyn. I wonder if there was a difficulty clearing the rights for those at the time, or maybe the set was wanting to ignore them to focus on different aspects of the band? Or maybe there was (or is?) a volume 2 planned. Perhaps the idea fell through after Ralph Spaulding disappeared after the 'unpleasantness' occurred from asking too many of the wrong people questions about what they were wearing over the telephone!