Processed Cheese: July 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 with Bob Seger, in a completely nonsensical video for "We've Got Tonight". It looks like a jewelry commercial crossed with a Viagra ad seeded with random concert footage throughout. A bloody mess, as it were. Watch Bob Seger apparently woo a girl by walking around in slow motion and never appearing in the same place as her, playing piano while looking like a dirty hobo and writing music (metronomes allowed) in his voyeuristically filmed apartment. This video makes no damn sense. Also, for a song called "We've Got Tonight", shouldn't at least SOME of the scenes take place at... I don't know, night?



Now we travel to Stockholm, 1986, to see Johnny Tempest and his band Europe (I still can't believe this was considered "metal") play their song "Ninja". That's right, it's about ninjas. Awful lyrics, regrettably long song. Unfortunately there is no proper "music video" for this tune, so the concert footage will have to do. Like most 80's bands, Europe have about as much stage presence as a bag of marshmallows - with their hair and the lights doing most of the heavy lifting - so I hope you get through it. Ninja sorvaaaaa!



I swear I'm not picking on the 1980's; I love a lot of music from that decade. I'll try to get better representation in next month's crop of fromage. In the meantime, watch Paul Young dance like an imbecile (in slow motion, no less!) in his video for "Every Time You Go Away". Nothing quite sums up the impact of this song like this YouTube comment: "I´m a very child in this years and so remember my first girl so dance with the close my eyes and so much large and big crazy kiss of my life never in my life you are missing" .... what?? Other than the lovely close-ups of Mr. Young (he must have been quite the heartthrob) this is basically one of those terrible concert montage videos. It still manages to throw in random details like a room filled with lanterns and netting (weird), pointless animation (weirder) and Paul Young throwing his sweat-covered towel into the crowd of adoring and stupid female Brits (gross... why didn't he just wipe himself off with his frilly shirt cuffs?).



Finally, we come to Raw Silk (possibly the material Paul Young's frilly shirt cuffs are made of) and their oft-sampled track "Do It To The Music". No video for this, but there is a painful performance from Top Of The Pops, replete with lip-synching and no visible band. Beyond the fact that this is a performance of a song about "doing it" to music being performed on a family-friendly show often watched by children, there's nothing particularly noteworthy about this. Once you finish, search for the U2 TotP clip from around the same time; a performance they're sort of ashamed of from when they were just wee lads. It's pretty priceless.