Yesterday we looked at a [classic ‘80’s power ballad](/posts/dropping-glass- slipper-from-helicopter/). It had all the themes that were important in the ‘80’s. Power. Ballads. Scarves. Cowboys. Today I want to talk about a song from the ‘90’s. The band would probably not admit it, but it is definitely also a power ballad.

“Closing Time” by Semisonic:

It has quiet, sensitive verses and a rockin’ chorus. I’m pretty sure that’s what Dr. Johnson included as the definition of a power ballad in his original dictionary. Of course, later scholars edited out that entry along with those for Oldsmobile, internet cafe, and Craisins. That guy was really ahead of his time.

This video is a [live without an audience video](/posts/excitement-mismatch- with-jet-and-vines/) that [includes a subplot](/posts/ridiculous-hairstyles- on-beach-what/). This is usually a good choice for a video because you get to see the band up close and personal but you don’t get bored because they only make two different faces while playing. Semisonic’s twist on this format is pretty smart. They do a split screen where half the screen is the rocking and the other half is the subplot.

Here the woman goes about her tasks closing up a restaurant or coffee shop or something while the bass player plays a piano sensitively.

The band goes about setting up as an inverse of the woman’s putting away. The woman makes a phone call.

I feel like this shot is some sort of cultural artifact. The woman is on a pay phone. The phone she is calling is a rotary telephone (when you are talking about a rotary you can’t just say phone, it is always telephone). The telephone is attached to an answering machine and that answering machine takes cassette tapes. One day we’ll have to explain all of this to our kids.

The singer misses the call. Luckily he has the answering machine so he gets still gets the message that they should meet at 10 PM. Based on the clock in the background that should be in 15 minutes.

The chorus comes around and it is time to rock out. Since Semisonic is pretty white bread they don’t rock out too hard, but this is the power part of the power ballad.

In the second verse it is closing time. Hey, that’s the name of the song!

It’s a little subtle, so let me break that down for you. Closing:

Time:

Guys, we can all hear the words to the song. There’s no need to beat our heads in with it. Closing time. Closing time. Closing time.

At this point the singer puts down his guitar.

I love that he removed the “hall” from his Marshall amp so it just says “Mars”. I don’t know if that’s like a thing , but if it isn’t then it’s definitely cool. Probably the coolest thing about the dorky singer in this video.

Now that the singer has left the performance, he appears on the left side of the screen in the subplot. Man, they really are having fun with this concept!

The singer walks over to the restaurant or coffee shop or whatever to meet the woman.

But it is closed! Because it was closing time! Didn’t he look at his watch earlier and see that it was time to close? This is a major continuity error in this video.

Meanwhile, the woman traveled to the performance to meet the singer, but he is not there.

During the bridge the music is just strings, piano, and drums (possibly a drum machine). They decide to represent this in the performance section of the screen as a record playing. That is pretty cool! It keeps the video small scale rather than all of the sudden having a quartet there, playing their hearts out.

Having missed each other at their respective workplaces, both the singer and the woman just decide to go to the party.

They search for each other.

All of the sudden the singer appears on the left side of the screen. The woman was just there!

After approximately 15 seconds of searching the singer just gives up. “I don’t know, dudes,” he says. “I don’t see her anywhere.”

On the face of it, this seems like a failed date. You have to remember, though, that Semisonic is from Minnesota. And while I was not born in Minnesota and do not live there currently, I am also from Minnesota so I can interpret this video correctly.

Minnesotans don’t look people in the eye. They don’t like talking about how they feel. Ideally, they have essentially no interaction with other human beings. Every time a Minnesotan sees someone they recognize they are filled with anxiety because they know they have to say something to that person. Minnesotans don’t have anything to say to anyone, so they hope the person is satisfied with a vague reference to the weather. “Some weather we’re having!” the Minnesotan will say, trying to walk briskly past the person they’re addressing. If the other person is also a Minnesotan they will say, “You betcha!” That will be the end of it. But what if the other person doesn’t understand Minnesotan social rules? What if they talk at length about how the weather is affecting them personally? Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat imagining just that situation. It’s best to never see anyone.

As a result, this video depicts the perfect Minnesotan date. The singer and the woman communicate via a recorded message and then never see each other, yet they can say that they were at the party together. They don’t have to look at each other or speak to each other and that’s just about perfect. Later, their moms might ask, “How was that date?” They will say, “Pretty good. We went to a party.” And that will be the end of it.

-PTD

Yesterday I promised a real 1980’s video. Today, I deliver. I try to under- promise and over-deliver, but in this case both my promise and delivery are regular in nature.

Anyways, take a look at this music video by Cinderella:

The song is entitled (entitled is to titled as Ensure is to sure) “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)". There is a lot wrong with that title. First of all, the grammar is terrible. It should be, “You don’t know what you have until it done gone away.” Also, what’s the deal with the parentheses? For some reason this is common in song titles, but it makes no sense. I always feel like I should whisper the part in parentheses. If it is meant as a secondary title, the correct way to do this is with a colon as in Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf.

What are the themes of this video? The most major one is that the director rented a helicopter and it was really expensive and he’s going to use as much footage as possible to justify this expense.

The second theme is playing piano by a lake.

Playing piano in nature is one of the most symbolic things you can do. The lake represents the ocean, and the piano represents Portugal’s foreign policy in the early modern period. The sand represents the native people of the Americas and they are ground beneath the feet of outlandishly dressed gentlemen.

On second thought, I think it represents sensitivity. The singer is a very sensitive person.

Here he makes the universal gesture for “I am feeling emotions right now.”

He is joined by his band mates who are suitably emotional and all have huge hair.

So sensitive.

Blondely sensitive.

The drummer is so sensitive that he hides his emotion behind his mane, which flows freely in the lake-side wind.

This song is so earnest and is sung in such an inappropriate voice that I’m not sure how to process it. The singer is sitting there playing his piano…

…and the sounds coming out of his mouth are in a nasal screech. I feel like he needed someone at some point to say, “Hey, buddy, you’re not a tenor. It’s okay. You can sing a little lower and no one will think any less of you.” And he said, “NO! I am a tenor! Listen to [the sound of screeching for 5 damn minutes].”

This piano by the lake stuff just keeps going for, like, 3 minutes straight without anything new happening or anything even happening in the first place. They really want to get the message across: The man has emotions. The only real excitement during this portion of the video is a tantalizing shot of his rad jewelry.

Suddenly the scene shifts and we are introduced to the theme of being a cowboy.

This is at odds with the earlier theme because cowboys feel no emotions. John Wayne is the most famous cowboy and he never showed emotion in his life. Or maybe he just wasn’t a great actor. Either way.

Anyway, upon closer inspection the cowboy is actually the same person as the singer and he proceeds to play a guitar solo.

I think this is really bad form. The singer gets to screech and play piano. There’s another guy who only gets to play guitar. Let him play the solo! You can hand the reins to someone else for a little bit without losing anything. The guy is an egomaniac. I now suspect that the whole cowboy thing is just his chance to live out some sort of sick fantasy.

Here is the singer thinking about how, after the nuclear holocaust, he will go to a small town where all the inhabitants are dead and dress like a cowboy. What a messed up fantasy.

Towards the end of the video the director realizes that he has a bunch of helicopter footage that he hasn’t gotten to use yet.

That’s the bass player. He is tiny like an ant.

I think that might be the singer or possibly the guitar player. It’s hard to tell, we are in a helicopter.

To tie all the themes together at the end, the whole band stands in front of the lake and then there is a freeze frame.

Do you understand now? EMOTIONS.

Join me tomorrow when I end the week with a video that has a totally different approach to ballads.

-PTD

Yesterday [I promised synchronized dancing](/posts/hear-no-evil-real-live- flesh-by-tune/). Today, I deliver.

And here is the synchronized dancing:

This video has some of the worst synchronized dancing possible. The moves are really simple and poorly executed. I’m amazed that any of the band members can play their instruments because it seems they are incapable of moving parts of their bodies in time.

This video isn’t all synchronized dancing though. “Music videos do not live by dancing alone,” as Sun Tzu said.

The video starts in black and white, possibly representing the past. We see a boy named Waldo whose lot in life is humiliation and anxiety.

He does not fit in with the kids at school. They like to have fun and throw shit on the bus. That’s fun, right?

And David Lee Roth is the bus driver! Awesome celebrity cameo! I understand that he is also a part-time musician like Bruce Willis or the Bacon Brothers.

This all happens before the song starts. I don’t like having an introductory video section. The pacing is all weird and the acting is terrible. Just play the song! If I wanted to watch a movie featuring musicians I’d just watch Purple Rain because it is impossible to make a better music movie than that.

Once Waldo arrives at school you get a closer look at his classmates. You have the baby punk with enormous glasses:

And the baby “a little bit poodle, a little bit rock and roll”:

In addition, each of the band members has his kid-pleganger. You have the singer what’s-his-face:

The drummer who’s-its:

The bass player, rock legend, and golden-throated background vocalist Michael Anthony:

And the guitar player, Ted or something, who is trying desperately to be cool:

Then, much like the Kool-Aid man, the teacher busts through the wall and everything becomes awesome.

She seems to be a combination stripper and beauty pageant contestant. She comes through the curtain, reveals that fact that she is barely wearing any clothes, and everyone goes apeshit. The video also goes from black and white to color. The kid-plegangers go wild, acting in a manner that seems wildly inappropriate for children their age. When I was that age I would not have been willing to stand up in those circumstances.

Then, inexplicably, the video goes back to black and white. Once the Kool-Aid man comes through the wall, the hole in that wall does not heal. My understanding is that those kids drink Kool-Aid and have fun until they collapse from sugar-induced central nervous system problems or get diabetes. At no point do things get boring again. Yet that is what happens here.

You get the wrong person singing, which is both confusing and obnoxious.

As well as the correct person singing after leering at a woman’s butt. Everyone loves a well-executed leer. Ok, now it’s time for synchronized dancing.

And then the teacher starts stripping in the lunch room. Note that her sign (ribbon? scarf? placard?) says “Phys Ed” because she is educating the children about her physical body! Get it?

This second verse is really strange. The singer looks really depressed and sings with no expression.

The teacher’s dancing and frivolity only reminds him of his own mortality. Some day he will die and then the fun will all be over. He becomes desperate and grabs the teacher, hoping to feel something, anything.

For obvious reasons, this leads to additional synchronized dancing.

Do you see how uncoordinated their movements are? It is amazing. Maybe all the dance sequences were shot in a single take? Maybe it’s all performance art about the futility of ever syncing with another human being. No form of communication is perfect, so what we are trying to convey and what other humans understand is always different. This is the message I understand from these terrible dancers, but who knows what message they are truly trying to convey.

Then, the guitar player walks down a table while playing tunelessly as fast as he possibly can.

This leads to the band and its kid-plegangers being imprisoned by a sexy guard.

For reasons that are entirely unclear, exposure to members of Van Halen causes Waldo physical harm. Here is what he looks like at this point in the video.

Van Halen is considered a metal band, but their music is not heavy and the band members are not threatening. I feel like they spend half their time getting perms and the other half playing pop music. If you listen to a song that is actually heavy, such as [“Outshined” by Soundgarden](//youtu.be/sNh- iw7gsuI) I think you will clearly hear the difference. “Outshined” has pounding drums, passionate vocals, and thick, meaty, Texas-chili-style guitar work. “Hot for Teacher” has synchronized dancing:

These guys are supposed to be threatening?

The video ends, after an epic 5 minutes, with an update on where all the characters are.

The drummer apparently went to medical school. And he is a gynecologist. HAHAHAHAHA. HA. Do people think that being a gynecologist is sexy? I imagine that treating women’s genitals medically is pretty different from having sex.

Bass great Michael Anthony went into the world of sports. This is a huge loss for music. We can only hope that he brings as much light and joy to Japanese wrestling as he did to music.

The guitar player is euphemistically mentally ill. Is that funny? Apparently.

I don’t get it.

The singer is a game show host. Good for him. It’s great to see a hometown kid make good.

Well, that’s about it. Except: Synchronized dancing.

Join me tomorrow when I show you what a real 1980’s video should be.

-PTD