FEELS LIKE I’M DREAMING, BUT I’M NOT SLEEPING [228]

I had no idea about this music video existed until I came across a screenshot online of a dog, thought it looked like something from a cartoon series, and clicked on it. What did I get? The sound of one of the most sampled guitar riffs of both the 1980s and 1990s, and wild imagery that spans everything from your childhood drawings to Piet Mondrian. I’m glad I clicked.

“Genius of Love” is the title track from the 1981 album by Tom Tom Club, a band formed by married couple Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, as a side project from the band Talking Heads – Frantz, playing drums, and David Byrne recruited Weymouth in 1974 to play bass guitar, and they married in 1977. The lyrics, sung by Weymouth, are a testament to the power of the boyfriend - “Time isn’t present in that dimension” and “he’s got a greater depth of feeling” - while listing the musicians and singers who take her to that same level, like Bootsy Collins, Smokey Robinson and James Brown. (Click here for when I discussed “Wordy Rappinghood”, another song from the same album.)

Tom Tom Club is not a simple husband-and-wife duo like the White Stripes purported to be, but also an umbrella term for the groups Wentworth and Frantz formed to make their albums. As a result, the very distinctive keyboard sounds on “Genius of Love” are from Tyrone Downie, of Bob Marley and the Wailers, while the guitar comes from Adrian Belew, who worked with Frank Zappa and David Bowie before leading the band King Crimson.

The video feels amazingly lo-fi. I thought I had come across an episode of “Roobarb,” about the rivalry of the eponymous dog and Custard the cat, animated by Bob Godfrey using felt-tip pens on paper. The style used by the series, where lines constantly move even when characters and objects stand still, is technically known as “boiling.” The “Genius of Love” video is made the same way, but the boiling also comes from the dizzying array of images thrown at you, from figures that turn into shapes, and the patterns that appear to have made their way into 1980s postmodernist designs by the Memphis group and others.

The video builds on the work of New York pop artist James Rizzi, who created the cover to Tom Tom Club’s first two albums, and whose style appears to be a maximalist, overwhelming even more colourful version of Keith Haring’s work. It can only be considered child-like in the bold and frantic use of flat, primary and secondary colours, and because few of his faces, if any, do nothing but smile. The animation by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, also directors of the “New Frontier” video for Donald Fagen that we talked about here, later the creators of “Max Headroom” and directors of the “Super Mario Bros.” film – yes, that one - preserved the energy of Rizzi’s art, while throwing as many images into the melting pot as possible. Jankel and Morton also channelled Rizzi for a later Tom Tom Club video, “Pleasure of Love,” which rendered the line art in neon.

After “Genius of Love,” both single and album, was released in 1981, it was sampled in a rap song, “Genius Rap” by Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, before the year had ended. The following year, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five used it for “It’s Nasty.” Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent, and Ice Cube have all used it, and it formed the basis of songs as diverse as Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” and Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack.” “Genius of Love” is just about the most sampled track of the 1980s – when you hear it for the first time, you will feel as if you heard it your entire life, because you have.

I’M NOT YOUR STEPPING STONE [197]

Many short-lived TV shows are filed under, “it was a good idea at the time,” but “New Monkees,” broadcast in 1987, can also be found under, “needs more work… a LOT more work.” A very short-lived show, lasting for only thirteen episodes (reduced from the intended twenty-two), one album and one single, it was never, to my knowledge, shown in the UK… although we did get “The Munsters Today” and “California Dreams” instead, lucky us.

“New Monkees” was borne out of the wave of nostalgia for the original “The Monkees” TV series, which reached its twentieth anniversary in 1986: MTV’s marathon showing of “Monkees” episodes on 23^rd February that year spurred a revival that kept the show on the air, drawing more attention to the band’s current 20th Anniversary tour. (Michael Nesmith was absent from the tour, but his media projects at the time, including a music video show for Nickelodeon in 1980, “PopClips,” gave him a claim to having invented MTV.)

Now that TV had caught up with the original show, with MTV, blue screen special effects, and a postmodernist mixing of styles, a remake of the show was begun, with a new band picked after auditioning over five thousand people. The group that appeared on screen were both actors and musicians from the start: Larry Saltis, Dino Kovas, Jared Chandler and Marty Ross, the last of which was already a musician with a band named The Wigs, before becoming a prolific composer for film and TV.

Having seen the first episode of “New Monkees” in a very soft-pictured, off-broadcast VHS copy posted to YouTube – the show has never been released on home video in any format – I can see it is as “Eighties” as “The Monkees” was “Sixties.” Bits of it play out like you are watching MTV, with the band name, song name and record company appearing in one corner of the screen when each song begins. There is an odd scene where the band talks about how they were inspired by The Monkees, but it feels like they were being interviewed for “Entertainment Tonight.” Old out-of-context black and white film clips are played for comic effect. The band lives in a giant pastel-coloured house that looks like a hi-fi system. They have a crusty English butler, and a computer that runs the house that is almost like Holly from “Red Dwarf,” but looks like the lips from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” then crossed with “Max Headroom.”

While the plot of the first episode was as inconsequential as the original show – it looked to be like they were trying to get rid of miniature clouds that were raining in the house (which is, by the way, a house they never seem to leave) – the main cause of the show feels like building a fanbase, then selling albums to it although, with only the first episode to go on, this may not have been how it eventually played out on screen. However, if the original Monkees borrowed from The Beatles, the New Monkees appeared to go with Mr. Mister and, even then, more like “Kyrie” than “Broken Wings.” You wonder why they used the name “Monkees,” except to achieve success through brand association – it would be like S Club 7 calling themselves The New Bay City Rollers.

As it turned out, the “Monkees” name sunk the whole “New Monkees” project, as it resulted in a court case with the original band, but by the time that was settled out of court, the nostalgia train had moved on for both bands. With little media available for the band, their subsequent appearances have been in nostalgic meet-and-greets from those that still remember their short run – their first live performance would not be until 2007, with another ten years later. Their latest concert, in February 2019, was held the Pig ‘n Whistle restaurant in Los Angeles, alongside original Monkee Micky Dolenz, enough water having flowed under the bridge. However, if another episode of “New Monkees” appears online, it may only be of historical interest, just like the nostalgia that gave birth to it.

WE’VE GOT TO HAVE SOME MUSIC ON THE NEW FRONTIER [144]

When it began in 1981, MTV had few videos to show. The first video, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” was already two years old by that point, and was played twice on the first day – Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” released earlier in the year, was played five times, as was “Just Between You and Me,” by Canadian hard rock band April Wine, and The Who’s “You Better You Bet.” Therefore, if you made a video for your song, no matter what type of video it was, and no matter what genre of pop music it was, it could end up in heavy rotation.

Meanwhile, Donald Fagen, of the jazz-rock duo Steely Dan, began the eight-month process of recording his first solo album, “The Nightfly.” It is a brilliant combination of fun and perfectionism – more bouncy, free and personal than Steely Dan, but still cut with a laser, and remains considered as one of the best engineered and recorded albums ever made. This success was down to Fagen’s persistence with recording his album entirely digitally, one of the first done so, while using the precision of a 16-bit version of “Wendel,” an electronic sampler and drum machine originally developed for Steely Dan by their producer, Roger Nichols, a former nuclear engineer who also patented the rubidium nuclear clock, to synchronise the digital studio equipment even more.

Two singles came from the album, both taking from Fagen’s childhood view of the future, as seen from the early 1960s: “I.G.Y.” – “What a beautiful world this’ll be / What a glorious time to be free” – and “New Frontier,” the latter of which had a video made for it. “New Frontier,” taking a phrase from John F. Kennedy’s speech accepting the US Presidency, is about a teenage boy inviting his girlfriend back home for a party in his family’s nuclear fallout shelter, the polar opposite to the “graphite and glitter” of “I.G.Y.”

The video for “New Frontier” was made by British animation company Cucumber Studios, run by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, before they created “Max Headroom” and directed “Super Mario Bros.” It combines live action footage, of the couple dancing in the shelter, with animation harking back to the early Cold War era... and then you remind yourself the Cold War was still going on at the time.

Jankel and Morton already demonstrated mastery of different animation styles with their videos for Elvis Costello’s “Accidents will Happen,” and Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” and therefore the animation for “New Frontier” is a giddy mix of styles, evoking Soviet propaganda posters, advertising, cartoons and album artwork, all evoking nostalgia in a point in history that, with hindsight, turns to horror. Fagen’s lyrics are by turns corny and sarcastic, both deliberately so – “She loves to limbo that much is clear / She’s got the right dynamic for the new frontier,” while also referencing, “the key word is survival,” and “prepare to meet the challenge.” Much of the imagery in the video is in time with the song’s lyrics, including Ambush fragrance and Dave Brubeck, and the brisk pace of the song is matched with the changes in imagery too.

Of course, on MTV, it was in heavy rotation, but Donald Fagen, who is only seen on a poster in the video, did not tour his album, and did not release any further music for ten years, having fallen into depression and writer’s block after feeling he exposed too much of himself on “The Nightfly.” It remains a brilliant album, even if Fagen once claimed not to have heard it since he made it.