And keep it company
VH-1 has this new show. I don't really know if it's new, frankly. It could be old and I'd just never seen it before. It's yet another one of those Top 100/List shows that they love to produce, but this one is a little more than filler in my humble media-hungry-retro-obsessed opinion. The show is like "Top 100 Awesomest Rockin' Rock Music Moments on TV You Grew Up Watching Especially If You're Thirtysomething" or something like that. That may not be the exact title.
I learned from this Music Moments on TV show that veteran actor John Amos of "Roots", "Good Times", and "The West Wing" fame was in the first groundbreaking, 10-trillion-burgers-sold making McDonald's commercial in which the song "You Deserve A Break Today" was featured, as sung by dancing men while they wiped the counters and swept the floors and lept over sparkling clean garbage cans with delightful tour je tes. They were not playing. I learned that one of the reasons that campagin was so successful was because it was during a time when women started heading out into the workforce. They didn't want to have to come home from a full day of work and cook three course meals for their fat chauvinistic husbands and bratty kids. They were tired. But they were still concerned about health and cleanliness. So McDonald's assured them that it was a clean and healthy family establishment and lured them in by singing about how much they understood and empathized. Ladies, you do deserve a break today! Sometimes advertising fascinates me.
Then there was the part in the show when I almost cried because the moment was so f'ing nostalgic. They showed the "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke" commercial. As a kid, I. Loved. That. Commercial. It was dreamy and inspiring. It made me feel good. I wanted to be in it and sing about peace and love with the rest of the multi-culti anti-consumerist hippies with coca-cola bottles in their hands. It was a brilliant moment in televison history. Man, I love that song. I hope you'll be singing it for the rest of the day.
How about the McDonald's commercial with Ella Fitzgerald, scatting along with a pre-pubescent Holly Robinson who showed up as a wo-man years later on "21 Jump Street"? Whitney Houston singing the National Anthem? The Huxtables lip-synching "Night Time Is The Right Time" for the grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary on "The Cosby Show"? Hey! I'm making it sound like there were a lot of black people on TV back in the 70s and 80s! How'd they do that?
Elvis Costello defying live television on Saturday Night Live in 1977, Sinead O'Connor doing something similar but differently in '92, the live recording via worldwide satellite of The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull singing along highly in the audience.
Then there was the launch of the phenomenon that was (and I guess still is) MTV, when someone called a VJ for video-jockey (RIP, JJ Jackson) named Mark Goodman said into the camera that this was the channel that was going to change the way we saw and thought of music forever. Who the fuck knew that prediction would be spot on? That clip made me wish I had limitless access to all of the videos that used to come on one right after another on MTV when I was growing up. Nothing looked like that then, and certainly nothing resembles it now. I don't even know when MTV shows videos anymore. There are images that define those moments. Like the video for "Don't Stand So Close To Me" by The Police. And "Jeopardy" by the Greg Kihn Band. And Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy". And that icky baked bean scene in the "Mexican Radio" video by Wall of Voodoo. Oh my god, and The Clash videos. And "Bringin' On The Heartache" by Def Leppard. And the panoply of videos by British bands. New Wave. Somebody stop me. Or tell me how I can start The Bazima Show on a possibly yet to be formed cable channel.
