Before this semester's classes start demanding all of your time and energy (ha ha), you may find yourself with some idle moments at your disposal. If so, you'll probably wind up saying to yourself, "Hey, I sure would enjoy watching an incredibly long string of rock videos right now, back to back, with no interruptions." Take heart, fellow children of the MTV age. A&M Videos has just released two new compilation cassettes featuring videos from two of it's hottest acts: Squeeze (Squeeze Play: The Videos 1978-1987) and Sting (The Videos, Part 1).
Sure - you've seen most of them before, and you've already got the records anyway. But if you just let yourself go, A&M wants to take you back to summer vacation, when days were spent doing nothing but swimming and eating frozen pizza, when television existed solely for the purpose of watching soap operas and an endless stream of three-minute musicals. Photogenic pub-rockers Squeeze should be familiar to any MTV mind-slave. Songwriters Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook have often been compared to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and while that parallel isn't completely justified, it's not too hard to see how it could be made. Besides being top-notch musicians and brilliant lyricists, they carry themselves with an air of good-natured goofiness on video that recalls the Fab Four circa A Hard Day's Night. The bulk of these songs can be found on Squeeze's Singles: 45's and Under LP. The video includes early nuggets like Another Nail in My Heart and Cool for Cats, but the videos were made before the genre had creatively peaked; as a result, there's a lot of fake concert footage and silly dancing. But as the band matured and developed more of a blue-eyed soul approach, the videos became slightly more inventive. Black Coffee in Bed is bizarrely enthralling, with its weird set and Sesame Street surrealism. All of the videos compiled here deserve watching, if just for the sake of hearing the songs that accompany them. But two selections are outstanding: the live versions of Pulling Mussels from the Shell and Messed Around are incredibly tight and radiate an unbelievable amount of energy. Some of the videos get a little self-conscious toward the end of the tape, particularly Last Time Forever, from their poorly received album Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti. But the band's perfect hooks and unforgettable melodies save this compilation's even less memorable videos. The music stays with you even if the visual images don't.
Not so with Sting. The man was custom-made for video. And though all of the songs on his tape are first-rate, it's obvious that sight, in this case, is intended to take precedence over sound. Only five videos grace this compilation, four of them coming from Sting's first solo LP, The Dream of the Blue Turtles. The last selection, Bring on the Night, from the live album of the same name, stands out by a longshot. Basically an all-out jam session featuring his entire band, the video swirls frenetically with Stuart Davis-colors and fluorescent figures. But Sting knows what his fans want, and he graciously fills the remainder of the videos with close-ups of his intensely brooding mug. Songs like Russians and Fortress Around Your Heart contain serious messages, and just when one begins to doubt the bard's depth and sincerity, he does it. You know - The Stare. That unblinking, unflinching, steely Sting Stare that pierces you to the marrow and will not let you go. It's like watching a video of Gainsborough's Blue Boy: No matter where you stand in the room, he's boring into the very core of your soul, following you with ardent eyes which bespeak the wisdom of the ancients. As laughable as Sting's on-camera pretentiousness may be, it's hard to find any bad songs on the compilation. There aren't any. As with the Squeeze tape, a few good videos accompany a whole lot of good songs. In the end, it all seems like a rather wasteful undertaking: Music as good as this shouldn't have to bear the burden of silly or boring videos. But that's the way it is. And the genre, like a couch potato on a hot summer day, doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. Squeeze Play: The Videos 1978-1987 and Sting: The Videos, Part I, available at any decent video exchange.
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