When it began in 1981, MTV had few videos to show. The first
video, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” was already two years old by
that point, and was played twice on the first day – Phil Collins’ “In the Air
Tonight,” released earlier in the year, was played five times, as was “Just
Between You and Me,” by Canadian hard rock band April Wine, and The Who’s “You
Better You Bet.” Therefore, if you made a video for your song, no matter what
type of video it was, and no matter what genre of pop music it was, it could
end up in heavy rotation.
Meanwhile, Donald Fagen, of the jazz-rock duo Steely Dan,
began the eight-month process of recording his first solo album, “The
Nightfly.” It is a brilliant combination of fun and perfectionism – more
bouncy, free and personal than Steely Dan, but still cut with a laser, and remains
considered as one of the best engineered and recorded albums ever made. This
success was down to Fagen’s persistence with recording his album entirely
digitally, one of the first done so, while using the precision of a 16-bit
version of “Wendel,” an electronic sampler and drum machine originally
developed for Steely Dan by their producer, Roger Nichols, a former nuclear
engineer who also patented the rubidium nuclear clock, to synchronise the digital
studio equipment even more.
Two singles came from the album, both taking from Fagen’s
childhood view of the future, as seen from the early 1960s: “I.G.Y.” – “What a
beautiful world this’ll be / What a glorious time to be free” – and “New
Frontier,” the latter of which had a video made for it. “New Frontier,” taking
a phrase from John F. Kennedy’s speech accepting the US Presidency, is about a
teenage boy inviting his girlfriend back home for a party in his family’s
nuclear fallout shelter, the polar opposite to the “graphite and glitter” of
“I.G.Y.”
The video for “New Frontier” was made by British animation
company Cucumber Studios, run by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, before they
created “Max Headroom” and directed “Super Mario Bros.” It combines live action
footage, of the couple dancing in the shelter, with animation harking back to
the early Cold War era... and then you remind yourself the Cold War was still
going on at the time.
Jankel and Morton already demonstrated mastery of different
animation styles with their videos for Elvis Costello’s “Accidents will Happen,”
and Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” and therefore the animation for “New
Frontier” is a giddy mix of styles, evoking Soviet propaganda posters,
advertising, cartoons and album artwork, all evoking nostalgia in a point in
history that, with hindsight, turns to horror. Fagen’s lyrics are by turns
corny and sarcastic, both deliberately so – “She loves to limbo that much is
clear / She’s got the right dynamic for the new frontier,” while also
referencing, “the key word is survival,” and “prepare to meet the challenge.”
Much of the imagery in the video is in time with the song’s lyrics, including
Ambush fragrance and Dave Brubeck, and the brisk pace of the song is matched
with the changes in imagery too.
Of course, on MTV, it was in heavy rotation, but Donald
Fagen, who is only seen on a poster in the video, did not tour his album, and
did not release any further music for ten years, having fallen into depression
and writer’s block after feeling he exposed too much of himself on “The
Nightfly.” It remains a brilliant album, even if Fagen once claimed not to have
heard it since he made it.
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