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jmknoll

With a promotion like "terrible, terrible Jefferson Starship video," I needed to go watch it.

That really was just a completely incoherent mess. But the guys with eyeballs on their heads were there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqLnVgR7fLw

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Every once in awhile I see an 80s video or movie, and remember: yeah, wow, people really did have giant hair back then.

It's not giant when everyone is doing it: it's just normal.

And what do you have against letting your soul glo? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=961x0NmyHKE

I find Lionel Richie a phenomenon. The hair and moustache look weird now, but his songs stand the test of time.

+1, but then my copy of Rick James' Street Songs has grooves cut into it, so what do I know of music?

“Lionel Richie's Hello is the Battleship Potemkin of rock music videos...”

~ Humphrey B. Flaubert, TISM, If You're Not Famous at Fourteen, You're Finished - De RigueurMortis (2001)

Richie closing out the 1984 Olympics was most excellent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zj7C3GRj7s

Somewhere in here you can hear Jim McKay explaining the difference between "poppers" and "break dancers" and it is just awesome.

A lot of things have always been pretty boring. People wanting to be seen were less likely to look boring though, so there's a selection effect there.

as they say about anime characters -- higher the hair, closer to god

It's true. I knew a person who got stopped by customs on an international flight because they thought no person could conceivably have 12 cans of hair spray in their luggage for innocent purposes (she did- for creating the massive 80s hair).

I wonder how anyone got anything done in those days. It must take hours and tens of dollars in hair spray every day to get your hair that big

I feel like I should be familiar with this song but I'm not, and I have to say, truly one of the great choruses of 80's rock: "we're layin' it on the line (layin' it on the line) ---just layin' it all, right on the line".

I'll see your incoherent mess and raise you:

https://youtu.be/UJ1tBVtYOBc?si=gSho4eXJMV96onaw

Surely this must have been when some new "clip art for video" technology had just appeared?

The song slaps though.

The Quantel Paintbox is the usual suspect for early 1980s video graphics excesses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox

The wireframe 3D graphics in that video must have been rendered in something else, though. Maybe it was made on Amiga with VideoToaster?

The original Amiga with its 8MHz 68000 CPU had just enough horsepower for that kind of 3D.

The song was released in 1986, which is years before the Video Toaster and the LightWave 3D software were released. They might have used an Amiga 1000 for some of it.

"Quantel Paintbox" is generally regarded as the most beautiful phrase in the English language, having taken the reins from "Cellar Door".

"It can't be worse than the Starship video"

o_O

This is pretty uninspiring, but let me be honest. I'd vote for Mick and Slick at this point. :P

What the heck did I just watch?

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