H.R. Giger's Debbie Harry music videos
Friday, July 24, 2009
In 1981, Debbie Harry - the staggeringly sultry singer for the classic new wave band Blondie - released Koo Koo, her debut solo album. The controversial cover was illustrated by H.R. Giger, the superbly creepy surrealist artist best known for designing the Xenomorph monsters in the Alien movies. Giger also directed music videos for two of the album's songs, Backfired and Now I Know You Know. Both clips included plenty of original Giger artwork, and for Now I Know You Know he even used special effects makeup to transform Harry into one of his sexy cyborg monsters.
The videos are rarely seen today, but with that kind of talent involved, they had to be amazing. Right? Well, yes. Unfortunately, they're not amazing in a good way. Here, have a look at Now I Know You Know:
The video begins quite promisingly, with Harry as a brunette, slinky Borg Queen freeing herself from a mecha-sarcophagus and dancing around in a Giger nightmarescape. But the rather listless, jazzy tune is a terrible match for the visuals, Harry's dancing isn't great, and Giger's camera just aimlessly follows her around forever until this starts to seem like some public access show in Hell.
Now I Know You Know isn't truly horrible, it's just tedious and amateurish. Backfired is the real howling dog of the two. Harry is some sort of disembodied disco diva - nothing but a head, arms and cleavage - doing some proto-Voguing in front of Giger's artwork. So far, so silly... But then Giger himself shows up as a rapping robot with a brass Giger face, and you can't even hear the last two minutes of the clip because you're laughing too hard. (Although it is a testament to the indomitable hotness of the young Harry that even with about 80 percent of her body missing, she's still sexier than a big pile of Pussycat Dolls.)
(Via Conscious Object. Fair warning: that blog is full of naughty words and NSFW ideas.)
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Technocrati tags: [Debbie Harry][H.R. Giger]
1 comments:
As a result of all the alien imagery in videos recently I got curious and came across the Now I Know You Know video. The thing about it is that it was made in 1981 before MTV even came on the air. To have imagery like that at such an early date is pretty remarkable. Of course it's going to be quirky and low budget. But given when it was made it is equal parts insane and inspired. Plus the song is good. I agree about Backfire but that whole album was more artistic experiment than anything else.
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