Domestic Left #79: Pictures came and stole my heart
Domestic Left #79: Pictures came and stole my heart
My early adolescence, when I was what is now called a “tween,” coincided with the heyday of MTV, when it still mostly played music videos. MTV came “bundled” with other cable channels: if you subscribed to cable, you got MTV, not because you necessarily wanted MTV, but because the cable companies sold you a bundle of channels — you couldn’t pick and choose. (There’s a whole fascinating economics of bundling in media, and specifically of how much our current hellish media landscape is the result of the “unbundling” facilitated by the internet. TL;DR version: unbundling is bad, actually, because bundling is how media outlets paid for real news.) Very few of the parents who bought cable for their households, I suspect, wanted MTV — but MTV is what they got.
However, my parents did not subscribe to cable, either literally or ideologically, so I had no access to MTV. Music videos, therefore, were a kind of forbidden fruit.
It’s hard to recall, in our video-saturated age, how exciting it was to actually see the musicians that I had only heard on the radio, especially given my tastes at that age: the first record I bought was the Cars Heartbeat City. This is the album that contained the mega-hit (and acclaimed music video) “Drive”, along with “Magic” and “Hello Again,” the video for which was directed by none other than Andy Warhol.
At some point when I was still mildly obsessed with music videos, some enterprising soul decided to start a new broadcast station in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas: Channel 30. I’m not exactly sure how they thought they were going to turn a profit, but during their brief existence they pretty much played nothing but music videos — I imagine because this was all the content they could afford.
And they couldn’t even afford Cars videos. Or maybe they were intentionally going for an “underground” aesthetic. Either way, it was not the place to go to find videos for the latest Top 40 hits. In fact, the one video I distinctly remember seeing on Channel 30 was by the most obscure of artists, Hege V (don’t even bother looking for him on Spotify).
“Burial Ground of the Broken Hearted,” the one video made to support his one album, which is by now long out of print, is a fairly typical music video from the 80s. Hege V and his band lip-sync the song and wander and drive about various natural and urban settings, accented by flames, smoke, and mystical-looking “Indian” runes (the song and video are not unproblematic). The video employs both slow- and fast-motion techniques, and switches between black-and-white and color, creating a dream-like atmosphere. While I assume that all of these locations were simply filmed in and outside of Nashville in the 1980s (Hege V, whose real name is George Hamilton V, is the son of Grand Ole Opry star George Hamilton IV1), to a white kid growing up in Kansas the leafy greenness and sandstone vistas of the Tennessee hills, the flaming arrow that opens the video, the large frame drum that the drummer plays, and, yes, the pseudo-Indian runes, combined to create an exotic allure. That allure, apparently, burned the name “Hege V” deep enough inside my brain that a few years ago, I went looking for his traces on YouTube.
The invention of opera was a specific historical event. At the very end of the 16th century, a group of men in Florence, Italy known as the Florentine Camerata, having learned that ancient Greek dramas were sung and accompanied by music, decided to recombine music and theatre into a new formal art form. The German composer Richard Wagner famously considered opera to be, in his own works at least, a “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or total work of art. Wagner was also famously appreciated by, and appropriated by, certain infamous totalitarians.
The development of the music video was a somewhat messier affair — music and film had been combined, of course, since the beginning of film, but the idea of creating short films specifically to promote popular songs began popping up in various corners of Western culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Arguably, this represented a response to the severing of music from performance that happened with the advent of recorded music, of the mechanical reproduction of a single, recorded performance. Before the phonograph, the only way to hear music was if someone was performing that music, within earshot and in most cases presumably within sight of the listener. Indeed, when we talk about going to a musical performance today, we talk about going to “see,” say, Richard Thompson, not going to listen to him.
So it’s no surprise that MTV became huge during the 1980s, during a time of rising moral panic about rock lyrics, drugs, and urban areas — it allowed us to “see” our pop-music heroes without, you know, going to see them. While MTV might have been considered morally questionable by my NPR-loving parents, I imagine for many parents having your teenager watching music videos in a suburban basement was far preferable to having them take the train into the city and hanging out in punk-rock clubs.
Now, of course, YouTube makes music videos available not only to everyone with an internet connection, but on demand. And I’ve passed more time that I would like to admit watching and re-watching those music videos that I had only the most limited access to as a teen. The YouTube algorithm has learned this, and if I am mindlessly watching, it will end up feeding me a stream of 80s music videos. Sometimes I will even consciously select a “mix” of such prepared for me by the algorithm.
Periodically I will also look up contemporary songs that I'm listening to a lot, to see if their videos are any good. In the lazy, jaded way of one who can access forbidden fruit at will. Sometimes I enjoy them, sometimes I don’t — sometimes I even share them in this newsletter — but they rarely make it into my YouTube rotation. They lack that critical element of nostalgia.
But there is one song, and video, that for me is a popular-music Gesamtkunstwerk — I rarely listen to the song without the video, and I watch the video all the time.
Sam Fender’s “Seventeen Going Under,” which was released in 2021, is a visceral song, with a pulsing emotional intensity. Its lyrics are full of the specific injuries of a working-class childhood (presumably Fender’s), but it also expresses the feel of every childhood injury that persists into adulthood. Having been bullied as a kid, the line “I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now” hits me every time I hear it, and I keep hearing it in my head over and over again after every time I listen to the song, or watch the video.
The video opens with Fender standing alone, wearing a grayish-beige electric company work shirt and shifting from foot to foot, in the middle a street of modest two-story brick row houses. These are the “two-up two-downs” of working-class Britain familiar from such 80’s music videos as Joe Jackson’s “Breaking Us in Two,” Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy,” Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town,” and, in a less melancholy vein, Madness’s “Our House.” It cuts to a scene of a young mother holding her baby on a bluff overlooking the sea, then, when the singing starts, to Fender’s face, slightly out of focus, among a group of young working-class men and women.
The twenty or so of them stand under gray skies, all staring blankly to our left and into a slight wind which tousles their hair, while Fender, in the middle, faces the camera. As the song builds, the video alternates between this scene, the scene of Fender standing on the street of row houses, and vignettes of small groups of the young men and women. The young mother stands on the bluff with her child, three young men trudge through tall grass, two young women size each other up warily on a beach. Another young woman walks through the streets, carrying a duffel bag and holding back tears, then meets and embraces a young woman with close-cropped hair outside the back gate of a house.
The lyrics do not arrange themselves nicely into a verse-chorus pattern, nor is there a traditional refrain which repeats at the end of every verse, but the song is not without structure. There are, essentially, four verses, each one a catalog of remembered experiences (“I remember the sickness was forever / I remember snuff videos”) that culminates with a final line where Fender’s voice moves into a higher register and summarizes the emotional effect of those experiences: “That’s the thing that lingers, and claws you when you’re down,” “It makes you hurt the ones who love you, hurt them like they’re nothing,” “God, the kid looks so sad,” and, finally, “I’m seventeen going under.”
As the camera returns repeatedly to the scene of Fender standing in the street, it both zooms in on him and spirals around him. His eyes follow the camera, but he doesn’t turn his head, and the motions of his upper body convey that he is still shifting uneasily from foot to foot. We slowly become aware that he is rising — by the end of the third verse he is level with the roof.
The song and video do a great job capturing the way our teenage years are dominated by powerful emotions that we don’t really understand, and how those emotions — especially anger — are both shaped by our circumstances (“She said the debt, the debt, the debt”) and shape our response to them (“See I spent my teens enraged / Spiraling in silence / And I armed myself with a grin / ’Cause I was always the fuckin’ joker”). And it also captures how, as a result, we can veer so suddenly between violence and tenderness, between hurting and taking care of each other.
When the two women on the beach lunge at each other and one launches a punch, we see the three men who had been walking through the grass jump up to separate them. The final minute of the video alternates between the men restraining the two fighting women and the three of them running down the beach together, the only shots in the video that have even a hint of sunlight, or of a smile. The camera returns to the young couple by the gate, zooming in on their embrace and showing them stroking each other’s hair.
At the end, as the song fades to a synthesized bass ostinato, Fender is perched well above the street he began in, rooftops of similar streets stretching out to the horizon. He is still slightly out of focus, and he looks no wiser, no more settled, less angry perhaps but no less confused. He has literally “risen above” his beginnings, but found no solace.
To end on a lighter note: if you’ve never seen it, the video for the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first video ever played on MTV, is really good, actually, and a lot of fun. Take a look:
He apparently also has a son named George Hamilton VI.