Back in the June, 1984 issue of CREEM, when we first unleashed the Video Video section on an unsuspecting world of helpless readers, we made note, while outlining the various raisons d’etre for the magazine’s decision to take the plunge into “thoughtful” consideration of music video’s anesthetic b)cultural c)musical d)none of the above value to life on earth, that the time had indeed come when “video has actually succeeded in creating its own specialized universe, an insulated place where videos could, if they so desired, relate to nothing else but other films, other TV, or (even worse) other videos...a vast wasteland all its own.” Sure enough, the past year-and-a-half has given us everything from Al Yankovic’s blow-byblow take-off of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” to Chicago’s Pete Cetera rewriting the script of Casablanca to fit his own willful needs (how’s this for a first? Musician leaves band after 18 years because he thinks he’s made such a strong visual impression that he’s ready to “ascend” to movie stardom) to Steve Perry pulling a Jimmy Durante-like “Stop the video!” in a middle of a “shoot,” which led to a “prequel” video the plot of which I won’t bore you with the details because I respect everyone out there’s intelligence too much.

Nonetheless, video, like time, marches on (although all too many videos seem to proceed much slower than time itself), and our report this month concerns a video twosome of, if not downright groundbreaking, then at least newwrinkle-adding, proportions. Because, in their own ways, both Phil Collins’s “Don’t Lose My Number” and Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” make real statements about videos—about why they’re made, what they accomplish, and how they’re perceived. Although he goes about his video with characteristic low-profile fashion, Collins neatly mocks the high-handed lunacy that often comes into play when a piece of music is turned into a video. The song—a fairly straight-ahead tune into which there’s no reason to read much of anything—gets buried under the “vision”s of a veritable host of ego-crazed directors, so that, by the time he’s through, the eager-to-please Collins has been plunked down in the midst of High Noon, Revenge Of The Ninja, Mad Max, Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing,” the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and the Cars’ “You Might Think.” Collins offers no morals and preaches no sermons in this clip, but the message comes through anyway: a song is a song is a song, regardless of what visuals are tacked onto it, and, often, in spite of the visuals tacked onto it.