MUSIC FROM SPACE: Billy Ocean - LOVERBOY

If you lived through the '80s, you were subjected to plenty of Billy Ocean. He was kind of the black Phil Collins, cranking out one tedious, synth-heavy mega-hit after another. And then, in 1984 he made this... thing. This crazy, cheesy, awesome thing.

Ocean's Loverboy video is a little sci-fi epic about a horrible, barking, goat-lizard man who visits a beach-side cave bar full of oversize jawas, monkey sailors, junkyard robots and other aliens. He catches the eye of a Jocelyn Wildenstein lookalike, laser-blasts her hideous lump of a boyfriend for no good reason at all, and then apparently kidnaps her, throwing her onto his horse and then riding away with her into the sunset. (And somehow, it seems he's supposed to be the hero of this story.) Ocean himself appears as a hologram entertainer projected on a rotating pyramid, and he is apparently worshipped by the oversize jawas. If all of this sounds confusing, just wait until you see the thing.

This quaint sci-fi curio comes to us from the '80s apex of rubber masks, glove puppets and robots made from old TV parts. It is an aspiring Star Wars held together with model airplane glue and rubber bands, a third cousin to the Gil Gerard Buck Rogers, a Jim Henson movie from the Star Trek evil mirror universe. It is all these things, and more besides. And, painful as it is to admit... the song rocks. Search your heart, you know it to be true. Give in, and join the oversize jawas in worship. (Just this once, I'm not providing an Amazon link. If this video leads you to want to hear more Billy Ocean, I don't want to enable you.)




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Technocrati tags: [Billy Ocean][Loverboy]