Best Top Music Videos of the 1980s Part 3

Back for more, nostalgia freaks? Okie dokie! We aims to please, as they say.

1. Michael Jackson - "Smooth Criminal"

No, he wasn't referring here to sex offenses. (I know, I know, cheap shot...) Instead, this video excerpt from the forgotten 3D Disneylandworld or Epcot Center or some damn place in Florida movie installment which was directed or produced or something by George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg or Francis Ford Coppola or Orson Welles or somedamnbody (you go look it up) and was called "Captain EO" (and I take it was mercifully short, although I remember I had a really shitty 3D comic book of it that came with the glasses but still really sucked)...where was I going with this? Oh yes. Anyway, this is a clip from "Captain EO" that was put on continual rotation on MTV and appealed to me because it had a sort of "Forties Noir Detective" thing going, and I've always loved bitter, cynical, hard-assed, misanthropic Philip Marlowe detectives of the Black Mask school of fiction; although I don't think I had actually read any Hammett or Chandler at that point, but I knew Bogart and got it all second-hand from comic books that were proffering Golden Age nostalgia. Anyway, this song is great. Annie, are you whoa-kay, are you whoa-kay, are you whoa-kay, Annie?

2. Madonna - "Like a Prayer"

This video caused a tempest in a teapot back in 1988 or thereabouts, when it was revealed that Madonna has stigmata and makes out with a black saint statue come to life. Indicating blasphemy or something in some minds. Also, the burning crosses didn't help. The video vixen herself looks like a silent film diva from south of the border, a chiquita too incredibly beautiful and electrifying to take your lustful eyes off of. Of course, I don't really know what all the fuss was about. The "story" is about some white thugs that rape a woman and a black man gets arrested for it and only Madonna can free him because she witnessed it all. How is that far-fetched? But the beginning and ending confuses it, and the making out with the black saint in the church probably didn't help matters. The backing vocals soar, making this one of Madge's most glorious and soul-filled songs (and Patrick Bateman is in complete agreement with me on this). And did she EVER look so beautiful as right here?

3. The Bangles - "Walk Like an Egyptian"

The Bangles were undoubtedly the focus of many a young man's uh, "ruminations" during their 1980s heyday. Susanna Hoffs and company were as gorgeous and inspiring a visual metaphor for 80s girl group goodness as the Go-Gos or ...some other group like that (I'm sorry, I'm drawing a blank, but it's early on birthday morning).

This song features people walking funkily across some city I guess is NYC, but also features Quaddafi (not then a dead man, by the way) as well as Princess Di (dead now of course) and Prince Charles all "Walking that Funky Egyptian". And these girls shimmie, shammy, and shake the appropriate parts during the appropriate parts. (Of the song, that is.)

Infectious watered-down New Wavey pseudo-punk. I could watch The Bangles for hours on end.

4. Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time"

An undeniably tear-jerking song that is as haunting as the video is just weird. Cyndi took the title from the glorious 1979 romantic sci-fi horror suspense thriller time travel movie Time After Time, wherein H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) chases Jack the Ripper (the late David Warner) to modern (1979 modern) San Francisco and falls in love with Mary Steenburgen, which is a personal favorite. This song and video feature Cyndi as the girlfriend living in some piece-of-shit trailer in the woods and grasping a toy dog coin bank while watching an old movie and contemplating why she had to leave home (she got a bad hairdo) and her momma and nobody has ever understood her wild ways or weird new wavey styles...except her nebbish, under-appealing boyfriend who sees her off on a train while she makes the referee symbol for "time out" with her hands. The End.

The song is incredible, though, always bringing to mind dead friends and relatives, and my firm belief in reincarnation; that men return to this world of material miseries" (as Prabhupada put it) to work out the balance of their karma. (Or, as Bad Religion baldly stated: "F*ck Armageddon...THIS IS HELL.")

But this song is like (as MADONNA put it): "an angel crying." So beautiful and poignant.

Here.

5. Belinda Carlisle - "Heaven is a Place on Earth"

The song isn't really about anything, but the video is obviously ILLUMINATI MIND CONTROL propaganda in much the same way as the near-contemporaneous "The Third Eye" on Nickelodeon was. Images of masked children carrying glowing globes equate SATANIC NEW WORLD ORDER DOMINATION...no bullsh*t. I bet it actually does.

Belinda clearly hails from the era of big hair, big earrings, make-up, and women without full-sleeve tattoos (calm the hell down, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with full-sleeve tatts or women having them, but...nevermind). I saw this video when it first aired, waking up in the back room of my late grandparents' old house, which is condemned now. It had been a garage they converted into a room for one of my aunts. Roused from slumber, the weird video images frightened me. They frightened me! They scarred my tender psyche. I felt myself possessed by Beezelburger and fourteen other demons. (It happens. It's recorded that during the Middle Ages, the Inquisition condemned a witch to fry because she became possessed after a demon jumped down her throat on a lettuce leaf. Ain't this a strange world, y'all?)

Okey (not a misspelling, it's actually what they said instead of the now common "okay" back in 1940 or thereabouts; at least, in Raymond Chandler novels) that's all for today. I hope you're ingesting these history lessons like pop rocks and Coke, oh wannabe 1980s old fart nostalgia refugees from another time and another era (one where women still slathered on the eyeliner and mascara and teased that hair up, up, up).

We've got room for one more honey. (Note: That's an old line from a "Twilight Zone" episode I'm referencing there. Howdyalike that? Huh?)

A little more "Night Flight" to take us home (back to 1987). Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts. We're about to take off!

Night Flight - Odds and Ends