Love Unlimited, “I Belong To You” (US #27, 1974)

Love Unlimited is one of the many unjustly forgotten female R&B groups of the 1970s. Their music is a celebration of unbridled love, devotion, and femininity—as far from the values expressed in contemporary R&B as one can get. In fact, Love Unlimited’s musical messages seem tame for their time, a decade that has come to symbolize the height of American cynicism, sleaze, and excess.

The “Beau Brummelstones” were a central plot point in this 1965 episode of The Flinstones, wherein starstruck Wilma and Betty end up at a taping of “Shinrock.” In the segment above, the band performs “Laugh, Laugh,” San Francisco’s answer to the British Invasion, an irresistible and quirkily arranged nugget produced by Sly Stone. It peaked at #15 in the US in early 1965; the band appeared on Shindig! in March of that year and by December on its Bedrock equivalent. I especially like Betty’s blatant, night-show-esque shill for “their new record.” (“Laugh, Laugh” led off Introducing the Beau Brummels, which is strong straight through: twelve Bay Area twists on the Beatles — and all but two originals!)

For more cutesy ephemera like this, ask me for a copy of my first music video mix, “Marsh Mellow Nuggets,” which also features The Association, a soda spot by Dino Desi & Billy, The Animals, performances from teensploitation beach movies, Syd Barrett in Belgium, Bewitched, the 13th Floor Elevators, and an all-velvet Japanese psych band. Volume two — “Eighties Ectoplasm” — coming soon.

The Moody Blues, “Go Now.” Decca, 1964.

This tune was first (and more stirringly) recorded by Bessie Banks, but achieved cross-Atlantic fame in this English version, with its copious reverb and blue-eyed barbershop harmonies. The high-contrast promo film was one of the first made exclusively to market a single — and its rather exaggerated way of styling the band has been echoed throughout the history of the form, probably most notably in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Horace Silver Quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1960

In 1958, Ralph Ellison wrote a letter to his good friend and fellow jazz enthusiast Albert Murray about that year’s Newport Jazz Festival. Ellison, who expressed ambivalence toward bebop and hard bop publicly but strongly condemned both forms privately, accused relative newcomers Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Chico Hamilton of “fucking up the blues” during their performances. But, in Ellison’s opinion, that night’s most obnoxious performer was Horace Silver, who, during his set, “went wanging away like a slightly drunken gospel group [sic] after announcing a blues.” Ellison, a man of somewhat patrician tastes who, like many black Americans of his generation, favored maintaining rigid distinctions between religious and secular black musical styles, was witnessing up close the revolution that Silver had begun in 1955 with his seminal composition “The Preacher.” It’s unclear what song Ellison was referring to specifically when he made those remarks, but it is unlikely that the song revealed Silver’s inability to tell “the difference between a blues and a spiritual.” Silver knew exactly what he was doing when he injected gospel phrasing, which, thanks to the work of Thomas A. Dorsey, has its roots in boogie-woogie piano, into bop. He was showing folks that bop could swing. It could swing hard.

Gwen Stefani, “Cool.” Interscope, 2005.

This expensive costume melodrama was a product of the prolific Sophie Muller, who made her mark through extended collaborations with Annie Lennox and Sade in the late-80s, and found a place in the alt-pop firmament in the 90s with videos for Hole, Garbage, Jesus & Mary Chain, and Blur. In her work with No Doubt and later Gwen Stefani, her style lost some of its edge but intensified visually—building on exaggerated film saturation, tricky editing, and manipulation of the musician’s public image.

The arc of “Cool” is almost completely described in the material of its costumes and the timing of its match cuts. While her other productions have occasionally turned out more like fashion editorials than music videos (cf., The Killers’ “Mr Brightside”), this one comes together due in some measure to Stefani’s acting—which is remarkably good, allowing to the fact that is mute and sliced into quarter-second takes. In the final shot, cooperating weather conditions make for one of the more satisfying MTV fade-outs. Dallas Austin, a seminal New Jack who masterminded TLC and penned “Motownphilly,” wrote the track.

The Beach Boys, from “The Lost Concert” released 1998, recorded 1964.

Why are studio audiences limited to TV these days? The production here — sound quality, filming, reaction shots — is impeccable. Recordings of The Beach Boys in their most familiar early-singles mode are pretty few, and this, pulled out of a drawer for the first time in the late-90s, is one of the best. It was once fashionable, in the simpler days of “rockism,” to criticize the Beach Boys for making extensive use of studio musicians on the early records. This show and their performance the same year on the UK’s Ready Steady Go, give something of a refutation to that, as they are obviously live and the performance is perfectly tight without being mechanical (the same cannot be said for certain others on that show).

In the US studio appearance they play a standard assortment of early hits but some of them with more informal live treatments: especially endearing is Brian at full speed in “Papa Oom Mow-Mow,” in an instant of which he seems to reveal an underlying irritation with the Mike Love’s impenetrable hamminess. Cutaways to the audience are a valuable primary source if you happen to be researching California girls’ coiffure, ca. 1964. [See also the first and second segments of the show.]

The Bodines, “Therese”. Creation Records, 1985.

The notes in the video say the venue is called “The Factory,” in Glossop, which seems like it might be confusing. This remarkable bit of ephemera is much more durable than the official videos the band put out, the silliness of which I find generally inappropriate to the music (like some of The Clean’s videos from the same period). The Bodines’ style in this is rock-solid archetype: the aggressive “fringe” on the singer Michael Ryan, Paul Brotherton in plaid, and Tim Burwood’s anorak. But then the C86 style is in such powerful vogue in New York now you see the same thing in any of Todd P’s basements.

Between the correctness of lighting, shambly perfection of the song, band-back story, and general demeanor it could not be better if they were deliberately putting this together for release. The video tape distortion near the middle is, of course, now adopted as a deliberate analog video effect among the lo-fi set. Odd, though: if I’m not mistaken, Paul Brotherton absent-mindedly strums out the opening riff to the Bats’ “North By North” in the warm-up, which is amazingly well-informed, because I’m pretty sure that song was not released until 1987.

From the same session: they rehearse “God Bless,” their first single, which for some reason was omitted from the Played LP.

Juvenile, “Ha.” Directed by Marc Klasfeld. Cash Money, 1998.

Juvenile’s first major label video represented a emerging impulse to focus on realistic images at a time when Hype Williams’ spacesuits-and-fisheye approach had fully permeated the market.

Pet Shop Boys, “Domino Dancing.” Directed by Eric Watson. Parlophone, 1988.

A typical, somewhat fatuous love triangle made somehow hypnotic, probably because of the loose walking-through given by what are presumably professional dancers and a generous serving of Old San Juan scenery. YouTube’s timing is a little off (as you can see in the close-ups of Neil Tennant), but synchronization of the gaits with the beat and generally exaggeratedly expressive gestures are telling. The structure is peculiar for a music video, with an array of dimly-defined characters and a staunchly linear plot, but the editing and comfortable use of metaphorical passages flatters this otherwise plaintively cheesy dancefloor burner. In a kind of bridging the dance-music diaspora, the Pet Shop Boys engaged Miami-based Lewis Martinée (who was behind the classic freestyle group Exposé) to collaborate on the track.

The La’s, “There She Goes”. Go! Discs, 1988.

Lee Mavers, who wrote the song, also provides vocals. The video benefits from Mavers making a very good show of being as high as the lyrics purport him to be. Presented with his whole deliriously strung-up attitude — guitar hoisted above his waist, his hamburger-wide figuration of the chorus, squinting skinnily into the camera — the otherwise perhaps overwrought vocals come into focus. [See also Josh Allen’s absurdist paean to the two minute forty-two second perfect pop song at The Morning News.]