“This Video Is Dedicated to Touching,” says the title card at the start of Harry Styles’ ultimate fruit-orgy of a music video, filmed at the beach in Malibu right before the pandemic, starring a few friends and some erotically charged melons. We really do hope the Paul Rudd–Bill Hader comedy Expectant Dads is coming to a theater near us soon. It’s a brilliantly ridiculous clip, and a near-perfect piss-take on rock movie clichés. Everyone from Donald Glover to John Oliver, Horatio Sanz, Ted Leo, Wyatt Cenac, and the mighty Julie Klausner drops by to recount “the rise and rise” of a cult power-pop band. Newman, “the boy who had a dream … became the man who challenged destiny.” He forms a band, they have a hit, success turns them all into coke-sniffing, money-grubbing monsters - you know the drill. A.G.īecause who doesn’t love a star-studded origin story involving fame, drugs, guns, knives, bad behavior, moving up, and selling out? WFMU’s Best Show host Tom Scharpling directs this “trailer” for the ultimate biopic on Canada’s the New Pornographers, with his fellow host and Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster as red-haired singer A.C. The Buggles dissolved in 1981 after releasing just two albums, but their place in pop music history is forever secure. Horn himself played a big role in this process by producing hits for the likes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, and Spandau Ballet. Within a couple of years, unglamorous groups like Toto and Kansas were on their way out, and fashion-forward acts like Duran Duran and Culture Club were ascendant. The choice amounted to the cable network brashly declaring its own importance before most anyone even knew it existed. The very first video the network played was “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a weirdly affecting sci-fi fever dream by Highlander director Russel Mulcahy that dramatized this changing of the pop-cultural guard. You could feel things changing.” That change came on August 1st, 1981, when MTV went on the airwaves at 12:01 a.m. “I’d heard Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine and video was coming. Ballard and had this vision of the future where record companies would have computers in the basement and manufacture artists,” he told The Guardian in 2018. Trevor Horn didn’t know that MTV was coming when he wrote “Video Killed the Radio Star” for his synth duo the Buggles in the late Seventies, but he knew the music industry was on the verge of a major change.
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