Processed Cheese: June 2011

Be back here every month for a look at the previous month's selections from my show's "Slice of Cheese" segment. If the song is significantly cheesy, there's bound to be a video equally (if not more) so.

We start this month with Michael Bolton and his painful uplifter "Time, Love and Tenderness". This video seems to have been a promotional afterthought, made at the same time as his label was setting up things like photoshoots and interviews (both of which are included in the video). The rest of the non-performance footage is made up of faux-candid attempts to humanize Bolton by showing him schooling a bunch of back-up singers at pool and overalls-clad basketball. Cut to the final round of choruses shot at what looks like soundcheck at an arena in Boise. The band seems to be way too into this whole playing for Bolton thing. I wonder what they're up to now.

Now it's back to 1979 and "Boogie Wonderland". There's nothing wrong with this straight-up performance video, except they inexplicably don't use any of the microphones they bothered to set up on the stage. Perhaps they don't believe in amplification.

The Victorian-era mishmash that is the video for "Goodbye Bad Times" by Giorgio Moroder and The Human League's Philip Oakey, easily the worst this month, teaches us a valuable lesson. If your wife spurns your mutton-chopped advances, you will be able to meet somebody to replace her by almost killing her in an equestrian hit-and-run. Women like near-death experiences, apparently. Also, muttonchops (see: Jackman, Hugh). Philip Oakey does virtually nothing, ensuring further decades of fame and success.

June's cheese comes full circle with "Be My Lover" from early 90's pop blahnd La Bouche. This has a bit in common with the Michael Bolton video; it disguises the fact it was cheaply shot in an empty warehouse by using lots of tilted camera angles and dramatic lighting. There are a lot of pointless shots of the one-verse-wonder rapper from La Bouche "dancing" (read: spinning, gesturing, falling into pushups) that seem like they were ripped from a Marky Mark video, and lots of backlit attempts to silhouette the singer from La Bouche as sexy. Oh yeah, there's also a plot: La Bouche girl hangs a man meat locker-style in a semi, drives it to an empty warehouse and sings at him in an attempt to woo him. Then there's a party.

I love music videos.