Mötley Crüe, "Girls, Girls, Girls"

Striptopia

THE VIDEO Mötley Crüe, "Girls, Girls, Girls," Girls, Girls, Girls, 1987, Elektra

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SAMPLE LYRIC "Girls! Girls! Girls! / Long legs and burgundy lips! / Girls! Girls! Girls! / Dancin' down on the Sunset Strip"

THE VERDICT Girls, Girls, Girls is definitely not my favorite Mötley Crüe album. It all feels a bit forced, like Vince Neil wearing frosted pink lipstick during Theatre of Pain threatened their male fanbase soo much that now they have to go as far the other way as possible, with strippers, motorcycles, and the beginnings of what will soon be all-out tattoo bonanzas on Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee. Boo!

On the other hand, people always say to "write what you know" and "do what you love" and so on, so it's not entirely surprising that the Crüe would write an ode to strip clubs. If you've ever read The Dirt or really even just seen an interview with any member of the band (or okay, any member of the band who isn't Mick Mars), you know that the Crüe are really into boobs and performative sex.

Yes, even years before Tommy Lee would marry Pamela Anderson, and create the sex tape that really solidifies this Crüe-boobs-performative sex triumvirate, this comes across loud and clear. It predates the tattoos and motorcycles by nearly a decade in my estimation.



I was, as per the internet, only able to come up with the NSFW version of this video (or I guess really the NSFMTV version). It's really not that different from the original though -- more ass-only shots, thongs, toplessness toward the end. It merely underscores how all of these women would not be strippers today -- there's hardly an implant in sight (okay, there's one woman I find suspicious), a bunch of them aren't that young, and in general, they're wayyy more natural.

I'm actually thinking there's possibly more than one NSFW version of this video. The one I've been watching to write this post has a lot of topless women actually dancing around Vince, who's sitting in a backward-facing chair on the stage. I feel like though I've seen another one where the black-and-white canned footage of Nikki at the end has topless women superimposed next to it. You never know, I could be wrong. I spend so much time watching them that I've been known to have oddly specific dreams about heavy metal videos that don't really exist.

Actually there's one other thing that's different about it -- if you've seen the MTV version, you'll see that almost no money is exchanged. In the uncut version, the strippers often have cash stuffed in their various, uh, garments. It's interesting that MTV was like having exotic dancers is okay, but demonstrating that it's a monetary transaction is a no-no. What, do they really think that'll take this down to the level of Club MTV?



This video is basically like Flashdance meets the Robin Byrd Show. If you've ever lived in New York City, you freakin' know who Robin Byrd is, don't pretend. Okay, for those who don't, she's an often fairly out-of-it adult entertainer who interviews strippers and porn stars, and lets them do a little dance (frequently set to bad early '90s club music and with a backdrop reminiscent of You Can't Do That on Television). They mostly run reruns, so a lot of her guests are from around this time, or a little later. In general, the whole thing is only slightly more salacious than what you see here (there's some mild fondling and the occasional pantomimed sex act) -- at the same time though, if I were you, I wouldn't click on any of the links in this paragraph if I were at work.

At the same time, this video is totally like Flashdance, a movie whose premise has always struck me as ridiculous. What, that a welder-by-day and dancer-by-night might realize her dreams of being a ballerina? Ummm noooo, the idea that the patrons of a dive bar like Mawby's really sit through a bunch of costumed modern dance routines without heckling the dancers to take off their tops. They even underscore this with the scene when Jennifer Beals' failed figure skater friend becomes a stripper, and they're all like, "no no, that's much too degrading. It's nothing like what we do every night."

In any event, the costumes in this video are very Flashdance, especially the girl in the sort of well, Mötley Crüe-esque costume who tears her fishnets and crawls around on the floor. If she'd just kept her top on, this would pretty much be a scene from Flashdance.



The other thing I find deeply amusing about this video is how the Crüe have created sort of an ideal typical strip club. If you aren't familiar with the concept of an ideal type, it comes from the sociologist Max Weber. The gist of it is that the ideal type of something is the perfect concept of how something would be. This isn't in the sense of perfect or ideal in that it's necessarily good or somehow best, it's more that it has all of the attributes that we would expect something to have. A key point about ideal types is that they don't really exist out in the world, they merely exist as reference points for generating theory. Oh, also they exist in heavy metal music videos.

Weber uses this to talk about things like the state and bureaucracy, but Mötley Crüe here extend the idea to the strip club. They've created a seedy looking place where the dancers are enthusiastic, and all of the male patrons can share in the ogling good times to be had. The Harley-riding bad boys of Mötley Crüe can sit side by side with the trucker and the businessman. The young and the old, the affluent and the working class stiff, all can share in the Crüe's strippertopian vision. Tommy and Nikki even joke around with some of the other patrons, showing themselves to be men of the (male) people.

Only Mick seems -- not unexpectedly -- more or less immune to the strippers' charms. He raises his sunglasses once, but otherwise he plays the solo in the Seventh Veil's dressing room without peeling his eyes away from his guitar even once. He is probably trying to figure out which of the strippers are really aliens or pod people or some such.



The other thing that's a bit genius about this song is the shout-outs the Crue give to all these real strip clubs of the world -- the Sunset Strip's (now defunct) Tropicana and (the very much still there) Body Shop, Vancouver's Marble Arch, the Crazy Horse in Paris (umm is that where Rusty gets caught in European Vacation?). They even show Thee Doll House (actually in Miami, but they needed to rhyme it with Tattletales), with a couple of genuinely gorgeous women hanging around in front (most of the video is shot at the Seventh Veil, in case you didn't notice the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking bar area). If they ever had to pay for drinks or lap dances at those places before, well, we can assume they never had to again. Plus, as long as those clubs stayed in business, the Crüe are more or less guaranteed that they'll have to play this song at least once an hour.

At the same time though, if you've again, ever seen an interview with the Crüe, read or heard anything about them really, you know that even women who weren't professional sex workers had a lot of trouble keeping their tops on around them in the 80s. Why would they even bother with strip clubs? Maybe they really like hot wings. Yeah, come to think, I could totally see Tommy being really into hot wings.

Dio, "Holy Diver"

RIP RJD

THE VIDEO Dio, "Holy Diver," Holy Diver, 1983, Reprise

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SAMPLE LYRIC "Holy div-uh! / you've been down too long in the midnight seeea / oh what's be-commmm-ing of me"

THE VERDICT When I first heard that Ronnie James Dio had passed, this was the first song I put on. There are so many great ones I could have picked -- "Turn Up the Night," "Man on the Silver Mountain," "Rainbow in the Dark" just to name a few -- but "Holy Diver" was the one I wanted. Maybe it's all the confusing Biblical imagery (I think the holy diver is meant to be Jesus?), maybe it's the sort of dark march feeling the song has, probably also it's the amazing video. Because seriously, this video is outstanding.

Yes, the beginning is kind of just trees. But the second the guitar starts in, and you see that old burned out cathedral, you know this will be awesome. Dio has a big ol' sword, and he's fighting a creepy medieval dude who's wearing a tiger skin and swinging a giant axe. Dio just rolls up like it's NBD, hits him once, and moves on.

Then we get the demon in front of stock footage of a volcano erupting -- I'm sorry, I love this. It keeps cutting in the whole time, and sometimes Dio sings in front of it, which looks awesome. I am filled with regret at not buying the Dio "Holy Diver" back patch I remember seeing years back -- the demon is so badass. As is the stock footage of a volcano erupting. I feel like this is where South Park get their vision of what hell looks like. After all, they did feature this song extensively in their episode about home schooling!



Dio keeps walking through the cathedral, which is full of smoke, rats, and fire. He passes a vaguely S&M-looking blacksmith, who's working on making an even bigger sword. He throws it to Dio, who fully catches it, then heads into a new room where there's a crow on a perch a la the Undertaker. Umm love it.

He gets to a spooky room with a trio of figures wearing hooded red robes -- one of them looks up, and they have plastic cat eyes! What is it with heavy metal videos and trios of people in robes with weird eyes? Everyone from Def Leppard to the Scorpions has this.

I feel like I should write a book that's sort of like a dream dictionary, only instead of decoding dreams it will be like "what does it mean when you see this in a heavy metal video?" Like you could look up "bums," and find out what it means when a bum stumbles upon the band playing in an empty warehouse, or learn about heavy metal songs that are about homelessness. This is kind of a great idea.

Then he's back in the main part of the cathedral, which is probably the coolest set you could ever have in a metal video (which is probably why so many bands used stuff like this -- there's a similar structure in "Can I Play With Madness?"). Honestly, letting metal bands shoot their videos in this thing is probably the coolest thing that could have happened to this cathedral. One wonders how it got in this state, but if it can help people like Dio and Iron Maiden make cool videos, there's nothing wrong with it.



Oh Dio! This is such a loss. I know that Wu-Tang claim they are for the children, but Dio really is for the children, from "We're Stars" to, of course, "Rock N' Roll Children." Every interview you ever read with him, you're just like oh, he seems like the nicest man. He's always talking about wanting people who feel out of place to feel included.

Dio is also fascinating for having had the closest career arc to Spinal Tap (minus the opening for puppet shows part). He started out in rockabilly, then you get the kind of hippie Dio, then the dark 70s Dio, and then the triumphant 80s Dio. He never made a musical about Jack the Ripper, but that's because he was able to stay successful enough to keep doing what he loved (and since his drummers etc. didn't meet with a series of unfortunate accidents, have reunions with various bands over the years).

Gosh, now all my Dio memories are coming back to me. I was once at a bar where there was a guitarist playing, and it was all like Tracy Chapman-type stuff, and then all of the sudden, out of nowhere, he does this absolutely gorgeous acoustic rendition of "Rainbow in the Dark" which made me applaud wildly, yell for more Dio, and yes, actually tip him. Sadly, he did not play me more Dio, but he did respond by doing the first bit of "Holy Diver" which made me scream like crazy. It made my day.

Because really, you can recognize those chords anywhere. And Dio's voice is amazing in this song, because for most of it he doesn't really have to do too much, and so when his voice really comes in, and you can hear all that richness and power in it, oh! It's just astonishing.

White Lion, "Little Fighter"

My Opinionation

THE VIDEO White Lion, "Little Fighter," Big Game, 1989, Atlantic

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SAMPLE LYRIC "Rise again, little figh-igh-ter / and let the world know the reason why / shout again, little figh-igh-ter / and don't let it impair the things you do"

THE VERDICT This song is so adorably horrible, just like so many of the things White Lion do (except for "When the Children Cry," which is just regular horrible). The other day I made a new Pandora station because I felt like hearing this song. I asked it to combine White Lion, Winger, and Warrant, and boom! This was the first song it played. Pandora's rather genius when it wants to be.

In any event, I've been in the mood for just this type of song -- poppy, inspirational, but with randomly crunchy guitars and a vaguely froggy-sounding vocalist -- for a while. This whole spring has just been a slog of hard work, and so I've really needed the inspiring stuff to get myself to keep at it (and yeah, the Krokus really wasn't cutting it -- especially since we don't even have crocus here on the west coast!). Hence here we are with "Little Fighter," an inspiring song but unfortunately -- not a very inspiring video.

Bracketed by black and white footage of the band walking moodily along the beach (very reminiscent of the "Faith + 1" album art), "Little Fighter" is mostly just White Lion playing on a stage set with about a zillion colored lights. Someone made the decision that the best way to light the video was to shine the lights directly into the camera, making a lot of the video bleached out and pretty illegible. But since all the shots are pretty damn repetitive, it's not a huge loss.



Mike Tramp is at his most teen idol here. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- this man looks like Joey Russo in a wig. Don't even pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, you remember Blossom. You know who Joey Lawrence is. Heck, you probably even remember his other, less successful brothers. In any event, Tramp is a dead ringer and still is today. They could be in some kind of Parent Trap movie about teen idols who are now adults and uh... want their parents to be reunited, I guess. Anyway Tramp is all over this video in a blur of white teeth, blonde curls, and colorful studded leather jacket.

Vito Bratta's also in most of the shots, though he looks way less enthused about being there than the other band members. He's downright subdued through the whole thing, even the solo. I feel like he's just getting the job done. It's especially weird since he doesn't leave the band. In contrast, James LoMenzo -- who is totally about to leave the band -- looks thrilled to be there in his custom Big Game spandex. I'd get started on how much I love custom spandex, but then I'll be back on about wrestling again, and I just dragged readers through a big ol' post on that, so.

Long story short, this video just isn't that interesting. It's really just a lot of shimmying around and making faces at the camera, weirdly (thanks mostly to Vito) minus the usual guitar waving. Why? They could have made such a cooler video for this song. In fact, I have the perfect concept and I can pitch it to you in two words: Baby. Animals.



I mean come on, "rise again, Little Fighter"? I'm sorry, but this just makes me think of baby animals learning to walk. Think about it -- little baby foals and calves and such, trying to stand on their spindly legs, and then toppling over. Or even more exotic animals! Giraffes! Or okapi even! Trying to stand, and falling over, and rolling around on the ground with their disproportionately large heads and eyes. It would be tooooo cute. And it would go with the song. Ohh! And they could feature baby lions, of course.

Then during the most inspirational bits, it could be video of these animals running around! Like "Eff yeah, I figured out how to walk today!!" And running with their moms and stuff. It would be super-inspirational. Plus super-cute. And I mean cute cute, not just Mike Tramp cute. Honestly, if White Lion had made a video extensively featuring baby animals in 1989, people would think they were freakin' visionaries today, and that video would have a gazillion hits on YouTube.

Seriously, try this as an experiment: Find a video of a baby animal (ideally learning to walk, but doing whatever, baby animals always are having troubles with like drinking or eating properly or whatever) on Cute Overload or something, mute whatever audio originally went with it, and play this song. It totally goes, right? I think I've really got something here.

So according to allmusic, this song is about Greenpeace. And yeah, looking at some of the verses in more detail, it totally is. But whatever! I think baby horses are totally also fighters for the earth. Maybe not the sea, but that can be for the baby otters.

P.S.: After all the Joey Lawrence references, don't even pretend you don't get the title of this post.

Dokken, "Dream Warriors"

Mr. Really Scary

THE VIDEO Dokken, "Dream Warriors," Back for the Attack, 1987, Elektra

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SAMPLE LYRIC "We're the dream warriors (dream warriorrrs) / don't wanna dream no more! / we're the dream warriors (dream warriorrrs) / and maybe tonight, maybe tonight you'll be gone"

THE VERDICT It's always tough to decide what video to cover each week, so any time some outside event prompts me to have an inspiration, I take it. Such is the case with this week's video, prompted by last week's release of a new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Why they had to make a new version of this, I don't know, given that they've kept the plot almost exactly the same (and that the original was so critically acclaimed).

Anyway, it's much, much easier to just remake an old movie than to come up with anything new, so maybe I should save this post for the inevitable remake of The Dream Warrior. But given that it's more likely they'll either a) give up on remaking this series or b) take it in a completely different direction, let's just look back on this one. (Which, now that I'm thinking about it, seems to be the most well-regarded of the sequels, which probably means it will get remade. Sigh.)



The gist of ANOES3: The Dream Warrior is that Patricia Arquette has the power to bring other people into her dreams, allowing the characters (under the tutelage of the heroine of the first movie, who is now a therapist at the hospital where they have all been committed) to team up to fight Freddy.

This was Patricia Arquette's first movie, but heck, her career has kind of come full circle, right? From Dream Warrior to Medium: She might not have reprised her Elm Street role in The Dream Master, but to this very day she's still playing women with creepy dreams.

The video kicks off with Patricia Arquette making a sort of little craft dollhouse out of what appears to be a popsicle sticks and some old copies of Circus magazine. It comes out half looking like the creepy dollhouse thing that's actually in the movie, and half like the creepy dollhouse thing from Quiet Riot's "Twilight Hotel" video.

Some of the next scenes in the video more or less mimic a lot of the first scenes of the movie -- Patricia Arquette dreams about seeing a little girl go into a rundown house, follows her in there, next thing they're in a boiler room, next thing "Freddy's home!" and they need to GTFO. A point of difference, however: In the video, Mick Brown is somehow drumming inside the chamber that heats the boiler!



I should clarify that unlike nearly all other videos from movie soundtracks, "Dream Warriors" does not feature scenes from the movie intercut with scenes of the band performing. Instead, it has actual sequences that appear to have been filmed just for the video intercut with scenes of the band performing. Yes, this video relies heavily on reaction shots: Cut to George Lynch. Cut to Patricia Arquette looking repulsed. Cut to George Lynch. Cut to Patricia Arquette smiling. And so on and so forth.

While most of the action takes place in the abandoned house, Dokken appear to be playing in some kind of papier-mache cave. The closest we see to a genuine interaction where Nightmare characters appear to come into contact with the band is when Freddy's arm drags George Lynch backward through the wall. Freddy is so obscured in this though it's hard to say if it's actually Robert Englund or just someone in a felt hat and claw glove. Never the less, it's more love than the Vinnie Vincent Invasion ever got.

And as per always, Dokken are killing it. Okay technically Don is looking pretty old and tired. But Jeff Pilson has teased his hair to new heights, and makes really intense faces as he does the backup vocals. George as per always is my favorite. He has his Mr. Scary guitar, and his sleeveless tee is making him look extra lanky (pre-body builder George is sooo much hotter than post).



Long story short, I totally don't get the remake thing. They're all "we're reinventing it for a new generation." Umm, as far as I can tell from everything I've read, the main thing they're changing is that the teens in the movie were all molested by Freddy as children, which while adding an upsetting undertone isn't exactly a game-changer. I'm also assuming that the new "more serious" Freddy won't be rapping with the Fat Boys anytime soon.

And I know, I know, blablabla CGI blablabla, but isn't it kind of cooler being like "damn they did that with pancake batter" or even just like, tons of red dye and corn syrup than just "oh yeah that's computers." It's making buckets of money, sure, but critics sure seem to hate it. But you know, buckets of money, so. They've already contracted a bunch of the actors for one or both of two planned sequels. Let's just hope they bring Dokken back for the third one.