One of the truly great 80's artifacts
WILL POWERS Dancing for Mental Health (Island) 1983
The vast web of rock'n'roll seems capable of stretching to include virtually any bizarre concept anyone cares to bring to it, but this strangely strange album clearly exists in a weird league all its own. Simply outlined, it consists of New York photographer Lynn Goldsmith reciting motivational self-improvement exhortations and emotional psychodrama, mostly in a synthetically altered ersatz-male voice, over busy dance music co-written variously by Sting, Steve Winwood, Tom Bailey, Nile Rodgers, Carly Simon and Todd Rundgren and performed by an uncredited crew, all ostensibly produced by Goldsmith. A phenomenal exercise of super-ego, this is both a Great Artistic Achievement and an unbelievably smug heap of horse puckey.
Video source:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1851501252569023971
FYI - the rotating head made the greatest hits reel at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference (the Academy Awards of the computer graphics biz).
MurryC
2 comments:
1983's the year I had my video played at the video night at Siggraph. Back then, CG was new and the rage was ray tracing Chrismas balls and texturing mapping with motion which this state-of-the art circa 1983 shows to great effect. This is a treasure for all CG types who have been creating art since the innocent days of 1983. Bravo on this big time!!!
I remember this from Siggraph during the early days of the digital revolution. Now that I can listen to the words, I see that this video was way ahead of its time.
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