I can’t find video of Richard O’Brien’s Dammit Janet [Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975], but I found Billy Idol’s White Wedding (1982). All the weirdos in the church, plus the juxtaposition of coffins and marriage, made me think of Dammit Janet. Billy Idol does an interesting job of fusing both the Brad and the Frank characters in this video…mostly Frank, given the vamping. It is also possible that he is a vampire, although I may be anachronistically projecting from a certain vampiric character [Spike in BTVS] that clearly ripped off his look.
…Wow, Billy Idol remade Mony Mony? All I’ve heard is the original. Maybe I need to investigate his sneer hair washboard abs music some more.
Today’s New Wave comments: Dancing With Myself is about masturbation. Safety Dance, besides being about safe sex, is the least interesting Men Without Hats song ever. In comparison to the rest of their thoughtful, poppy, odd oeuvre, it’s dull and predictable.
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You didn’t know about the Mony, Mony remake?
Quick story about that song – when I was in 8th grade, I was in show choir, and that was one of our selections for a huge competition. It was one of those weekend-long things where all of the groups practiced a bunch of numbers to perform together after the judging took place. Anyway, the night before the competition they had a mixer for all of us, and Mony, Mony came on the stereo. Well, like the junior high geeks that we were, our group broke away from whoever else we were talking/dancing with (or in at least one case, dropped their soda) and did the whole damn songs’ worth of choreography. We won the competition – turns out we had pulled a major psychological coup on someone else’s home turf…