Monday, August 21, 2006

Introducing...Remembrance of Videos Past

Remembrance of Videos Past is my new daily feature on this blog. After Stereogum put up the "Give Peace a Chance" video and called it "Video Flashback," I was going to use that title. Nevertheless, in case they use that title again in the future, I went the more pretentious route and decided to make a lame Marcel Proust reference.

In Remembrance of Things Past, the protagonist eats a madeleine and remembers things. That's all I know about the book. These videos bring back personal memories.

Each video segment will have a personal anecdote. I will not post videos that came out less than ten years ago.

Here is the inaugural video: AC/DC, "Who Made Who"

I moved to the suburbs from Queens with my mom and my grandma when I was 10. When we got cable for the first time I was excited. At the time I loved pop music (Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson). But when I turned on MTV the first day, I saw these robot popes making this guy with a prep school uniform. At some point the robot synod convenes around the surgery table, a bolt of lightning strikes their creation and voila-an army of prep school guitarists. It's like these robo-popes were making their own Catholic school of rock and roll.

If you want ten year olds to love your band, put robots and lightning bolts whenever and however you can into your video. Oh and at 1:43, Angus Young makes this awesome jump from this Grand Guignol ledge with not one, not two, but four lightning bolts striking him.

Later on, I would love rock bands like Guns N Roses, Metallica, Ramones, Nirvana, Pavement, Cornershop, Flaming Lips, White Stripes, Islands. But for the year of 1986, no one was better than AC/DC. They popped my rock and roll cherry and I have now been a rock fanatic for twenty years.



(courtesy of Halford0484)

1 comment:

Cibbuano said...

your rock n roll cherry? Sounds dirty!