I don’t know about you, but for me, the moment of truth about music videos came when I first saw Pat Benatar’s sleazoid epic of society’s childom, “Love Is A Battlefield.” I mean, here was the first video I’d seen in which the song meant little, if anything, to the video. Not that it’s a bad song—it isn’t—but because somewhere in the planning stages, the “creators” of this film (made, after all, to promote the song) saw that song as little more than soundtrack material, with little (outside of the title, perhaps) to draw from for their mini-drama. In other words, the song’s basic female love/pain/teens /angst turf, turf that Ms. Benatar has, for some time now, held reign over (Lesley Gore, where are you now that we really need you?), was apparently deemed not “high concept” enough to build on.

So what did we get for our four minutes and change? First of all, we got a bona fide “prologue” depicting life in dead-as-doornails suburbia, with Pat the “confused girl” aching to “do her own thing,” and getting run out of the house for her troubles. What then follows is the pathetic tale of a young lass who hits the big town with big dreams, only to become a hapless street urchin, ultimately falling into the sweaty clutches of the local Third World pimp (gold tooth and all) and turning into your basic Minnesota Strip teen runaway turned you-know-what. Things remain suitably disgusting until the girls in the office, obviously upset about the lack of coffee breaks in their work schedule, improvise a ritualistic dance of the oppressed, throw a drink or two in ye pimp’s puss, and march out triumphantly onto Manhattan’s always hope-filled Fourteenth Street. From there it’s off to huggy kissy bye-bye land by the defunct part of the West Side Highway and, presumably, a new start—which, for Our Miss Patty, means a bus ticket back to the “safety” of hearth and home. Goodbye, New York, hello, East Orange, and all that.