The “Yankee Rose”. Refers to the Statue of Liberty. This is Dave’s tribute to it. He even begins with short vignette honoring immigrants in America.
I am a big fan of the 80s and I even have generally positive thoughts about Diamond Dave, so I tried telling myself that this is so horrible and unacceptable by today’s standards just goes to show that we as a society are so offensive and incapable of fun.
Then I remembered the giant penis microphone. The man-thong tights.
My God.
I challenge you to find a more completely horrible music video.
Odd. I remember the “Give me a bottle of anything — and a glazed doughnut.” But I did not remember anything else about the song or the video.
In my opinion, the microphone was too silly to be offensive. I was more annoyed by the way he kept waving his nether regions at the camera.
I am certain that he had sex with a lot of groupies back in the day. But why?
Were they physically attracted to him?
Were they attracted to celebrity?
Or were they just laughing too hard to say “No”?
To be fair, your second link goes to a pastiche by Australian comedian Santo Cilauro. He was deliberately lampooning the stylistically retarded music and fashions of post-Soviet pop idols, who after 70 years behind the Iron Curtain had had few opportunities to learn English and only occasional, distant glimpses of Western pop culture. That said, there are probably a lot of genuine Soviet and post-Soviet music videos from the 1980s and 1990s that are just as hilarious, albeit unintentionally.
Lakeside’s Fantastic Voyage features a sort of pirate ship with track lighting, some kind of pirate-y dance moves, a possibly drunk cameraman, and a sword fight. It even has flashy special effects to help tell the. . . not story. Yet with all that, every time I watch it I marvel and the sound stage full of sand.
It was the 80’s, what did you expect? You might as well complain that Dickens was fond of a stereotype.
Of course there were some dreadful videos of questionable taste, it was a time of excess and experimentation in the medium of musical video, but for every David Lee Roth you also get the tasteful genius of “Take on Me” or the long version of the gloriously sexy and NSFW “Girls on Film” ( can’t link the version I want to as I’m at work but…you all know it surely?) and note I say “sexy” and not “sexist” quite deliberately, not every use of tits is automatically a bad thing.