Crimson and Clover’s reddish backdrops remind me of the colors used for the strange beach in Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes. It’s cheap and dirty.Ĭrimson and Clover’s director, David Mallett, was a staple of early MTV, directing many important heavy rotation videos, including all of Def Leppard’s Pyromania videos and most of David Bowie’s videos from the 1970s through Let’s Dance. It’s not cinematic like Beat It or Total Eclipse of the Heart. It’s got that overexposed cheap videotape look characteristic of so many videos from this era. It is a performance clip filmed in a studio with reddish canvas backdrops. The video is very stereotypical of the early 1980s.
#JOAN JETT CRIMSON AND CLOVER MOVIE#
Or maybe it was allowed because it still fell within the realm of the heterosexual fantasy even with the lesbian undertones, like a lesbian porn movie designed for heterosexual men. Someone must have tried to talk her out of it at some point. Jett saw an opportunity for subversion and took it. I actually can’t think of another song on MTV in which a cover results in a same-sex dynamic. I wonder what everyone did back in the 1940s, with all those male and female orchestra singers were singing from the same songbook. I remember that wretched Tiffany song I Saw Him Standing There, butchering the Beatles for the sake of heteronormativity. I wonder how often performers change lyrics to avoid gay implications. There must be an interesting study of gender pronouns in popular songs out there somewhere. The video, however, amplifies the searing lust of the song and underscores the lesbian undertones of Jett’s version. This was a conscious choice on her part, and not without some risk of censorship, but luckily a pretense of plausible deniability existed: it’s just a cover, that’s how the song’s written.
Since we now know Jett’s a lesbian, these pronouns take on a new level of significance and reveal another example of a queer artist signifying her queerness on a channel that pretended such things did not exist. The result is a sexy love song being sung from one woman to another woman. Jett’s black leather jacket, spiky hair, menacing sneer, and gristly voice blend together sexy and tough.įrom a queer perspective, the most interesting thing about this video is that a male singer, Tommy James, originally popularized the song and Jett has not changed the song’s gender pronouns for her own version. Her toughness has overtones of violence, like she could have kicked Pat Benatar’s ass if she wanted to. Yet she also radiates a feminist sense of strength, toughness, power, and control. She certainly seemed willing to cater to adolescent male sex fantasies with her sexual mugging, posturing, and innuendos. I don’t think it was publicly known that she was a lesbian in the early 1980s, despite the tomboy vibe of her videos. It seems generally accepted today that she is a lesbian, and my students tell me she is out. This was highlighted in the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction concert in which she filled in for Kurt Cobain playing Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana’s most important song. Recently, the movie The Runaways revived interest in her career, reminding us of her importance in American popular culture. She disappeared from MTV for several years, then returned with the heavily overplayed “I Hate Myself for Loving You” in 1988.
Many of her early 1980s videos look embarrassingly primitive today, but at the time they were fun and novel. Joan Jett figures prominently in early MTV history because her anthemic smash “I Love Rock n Roll” peaked right when MTV debuted. This is the third most popular Joan Jett video on Youtube, with just over 6 million views. (quote from When MTV Ruled the World, 209) … I think she drove a lot of guys wild, there’s no doubt.” She just couldn’t have been more appealing to a guy like me. I don’t think any of us understood what ‘bisexual’ necessarily was back then.
0 kommentar(er)
