While that’s very bad, it surely has to be topped by Live’s “Dolphin’s Cry.” I’ve never seen the video and I don’t need to. Just the title - “Dolphin’s Cry.” That’s hilarious; you’d expect to see that airbrushed onto a cheap black sweatshirt.
I’ll answer anyway. They were a group of burlesque dancers who decided to recruit a lead singer (Nicole Scherzinger) and remake themselves as a pop band.
“Don’t Cha” was their first video.
IMO, “Losing My Religion” was a masterwork of droll minimalist subtly in comparison to that self-indulgent wankdoodlefest that was the One I Love video.
Having grown up in the “age of REM” (late 80s), nothing was ever funnier than the nerdy artschool hipsters who thought REM were ‘postmodern geniuses.’
My brain had done just the reverse, I had forgotten the flailing white guy and remembered only the very old man with wings. I really liked the video, but perhaps that is because I had just read GGM’s The old man with enormous wings.
Wasn’t it the first video that they, REM, actually appeared in?
I didn’t think it was that bad then. Decent song too.
Michael Stipe, at least, was in “Stand.”
yeah the song is about some girl he hope/thought he had a chance with and all the confusion that comes from not just asking her. great song, the video is strange in that the director evidently took all the religious bits seriously and no one told him it wasnt a religious song.
I always thought that “losing my religion” meant barfing. I could be wrong. In fact, upon a yahoo search it appears I am.
The video is odd but certainly not the most laughable of music videos. Being an 80’s gal, I love Journey, but their music videos were cringeworthy from the day they were released. In one video, “Separate Ways” the band, for inexplicable reasons, all play air instruments. Oookay. And then there’s Neal Schon and Steve Perry duking it out over a… mannequin. Not that she’s isn’t lovely, but still.
And you’re dead on with that. It’s mostly just Ed Kowalcyk standing around in an alley in the Jesus pose with a bunch of teenagers running past him, until an ocean wave overcomes them.
“Girl”?? I thought that Stipe had finally (after a loooooong time of hemming & hawing) came out as gay a few years ago.
There’s an old adage: Shut up - better that some people think you’re a fool than you open your mouth and remove all doubt.
I always thought this applied to R.E.M. I loved their unintelligible stuff - “Radio Free Europe” which calls all in transit but we don’t know why, “Pilgrimage” with its references to a “two-headed calf” or seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean (yes I know it is a reference to an old Asian story, but Stipe just liked the sound of the words). The music was great and the random-but-cool-sounding lyrics added an air of mystery and hipper-than-thou.
Then you get to South Central Rain (could he say he was sorry more?) and stuff like LMReligion - oh, so now that he found his lyrics, this is the stuff he writes? Okay - never mind…I liked you better when I couldn’t understand you. And when the music throttled back and Bill Berry wasn’t able to bring the bounce - man, his drums were great on the early stuff, but less necessary to the slow songs they were doing before he left…
And yeah, Tarsem is a whacky visual artist - I get that he is more about style than substance, but it was a visually interesting style so I didn’t give it more thought than that…
My $.02
Everyone loved it. It won 87 awards at the VMAs that year. (Ok, according to wikipedia only 6 - but it was a lot, including “Video of the Year” against “Silent Lucidity,” “Wicked Game,” “Groove is in the Heart,” “Gonna Make You Sweat,” and “I Touch Myself.”)
It still looks good, the images are pretty, kind of weird, and go along with the song. It’s a bit pretentious, but I remember everyone knowing it was pretentious and over the top and being in on the not-seriousness of it.
It’s a good video. Plus, you saw it on MTV because they played videos then. Now, get off of my lawn.
Mt thoughts, roughly in order while viewing…
“Well, I guess I didn’t miss much not having MTV back then…”
“…never did like REM much…”
“…what the frack is going ON?”
“Icarus? DaVinci? Is this based off some old oil painting or something?”
“oooh pretty angel white hair flash gone…”
“Pretty. It’s definitely pretty, but what does it mean?”
“(That’s the beauty of it, it doesn’t MEAN anything…)”
So there you are. And then I googled and found internet scuttlebutt that the DoP for “Losing My Religion” was none other than Alton Brown. Can’t find an official confirmation of that though.
I did find, thanks to wikipedia, that it was a multiple award winning video when it came out, which would suggest that yeah, it *was *taken seriously at the time:
According to Wikipedia, Alton Brown did “The One I Love”, not “Losing My Religion”.
“Everybody Hurts” still holds up. Great song with a great video.
Well, great video, anyway.
I’m at work, so I’m not going to get on Youtube, but wasn’t the “Everybody Hurts” video a rip-off of the opening scene in Fellini’s 8&1/2?
Wow- I had never seen REM do “End of the World” live, but it’s pretty damned good.
It’s actually one of the few songs I’ve never not seen them do live. I think Stipe liked that one.
Superman is one that they refused to play live for a long time (maybe still).
Ok, all you haters, I love and always have loved this video. I admit it! Yes, of course it’s pretentious art crap, and yet amusing. So were we. So are you, just a different era. Take your Pink Floyd or Franz Ferdinand and eat it.
(I love the odd mixed oblique religious/ideological iconography/references, and the suggestion of tableaux vivants)
You know, I was going to say, (from memory), what’s the big deal-it’s just Michael Stipe pacing around, waving his arms and singing. But I forgot about the saints and the angels and the Hindu dancers and all that. I wouldn’t call it “hilariously funny,” more like, “it’s funny because it’s so fucking pretentious.”
I mean, I like R.E.M. and all, and I like their music-but Michael Stipe takes himself waaaaay too seriously.