This is not the video to "Steam".
Stephen R. Johnson's video for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer is famously ground-breaking. It teamed the Brothers Quay with Nick Park and seemed an impossible act to follow, but their next collaboration, Big Time, was even better, and made the Sledgehammer video look, if anything, a little one-note...
Hi there! This is also not the video to "Steam".
I think so, anyway (and it breaks my heart that I can't find anything higher definition) but maybe I just like songs about lonely supervillains. Now, Stephen R. Johnson made three videos for Peter Gabriel in total, and by the release of Steam he'd clearly decided to move on from puppetry, stop motion animation, practical effects and the like, and embrace the new technonology... CGI.... motion capture... but some ground is perhaps better left unbroken, because - Well...
I can't honestly tell if the ideas in this video are actually any worse than what Johnson had put on screen previously. Still, more than anything that has ever been made, more than even the Star Wars prequels, it provides blinding, petrifying evidence of the hitherto unachievable stupidity of a thing that, thanks to CGI, could now be made without anyone having to work out how. Readers, this is the video to "Steam". It might be the worst video ever made. Stand back:
Forgive me, Peter.
And feel free to tell me your favourite bits in the comments below. Here's today's Defoe, a tale containing both craft and craftiness:
*hears the 80s pop video klaxon and comes running*
ReplyDeleteYeah, Steam's quite something, innit. It's the phwoar-look-at-these-dollybirds sexism in cahoots with the crap CGI that really pushes it into shitbucket territory. I reckon the perverted sentient armchair is probably the nadir, but it's a tough choice. Also, I like to imagine the dancing thong is actually the black panties from Steve Miller's Abracadabra trying for a solo career. Shame it never worked out.
Interestingly (?) Stephen R. Johnson also has this video on his youtube channel, but the close-up of the dancing crotch has been cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrsLK3AeTk4
ReplyDeleteAh yes, the equivalent of there being a naughtier version of Duran Duran's Wild Boys in which some of the post-apocalyptic denizens are topless ladies.
ReplyDeleteI would quite like to hear Now That's What I Call Lonely Supervillain Anthems, come to think of it: Behind Blue Eyes, First We Take Manhattan, etc. etc.
On it! (Both)
ReplyDeletewell i wha whoa whwhyw woah.
ReplyDeleteYuh-huh
ReplyDelete