Brian Raftery

I definitely remember nights and times when I was singing when everyone would just kind of turn their head toward the video because they were so strange and they're so ambitious and they're so weird.

And some of them look really great.

Like the Benny and the Jets video, you can interpret that song 85 million ways.

But the video we remembered for some reason was like a mom luring a bunch of kids slowly to a plate full of cookies.

And I'm like, what the hell does this have to do with Benny and the Jets?

No Benny, no Jets.

There's a very strange video that we used to talk about all the time for Paul McCartney's Ebony and Ivory, which was really, I don't know if it's problematic or not, but it was like, there's a black man walking a white dog, and then a white man walking a black dog, and then they become friends.

It is trying to be true to the spirit of this, you know, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder duet, but it makes no sense that it's a dog park.

I was just kind of like, this is weird that like, this is a video that like, we're just here as a goof and someone put a lot of time and effort to make this video for this Hall & Oates song that we're all drunkenly singing in a tiny room.

It's about as close to an outside-of-Hollywood Hollywood project as you can get.

By the time Pioneer got into this, I think they needed to have some sort of story.

Because at that point, Western audiences, especially after seven or eight years of MTV, they knew that every video had to have either a wild collage or a very easy to follow narrative.

You know, if it was a song, if it was Thriller, they did not want you to do, like, the Thriller dance.

They wanted you to come up with something original.

I know they did not want people singing.

I think that's one thing is to have no one singing along to the song, almost like not acknowledging that it's there because the focus should be on the singer.

Oh my God, it's probably, probably one of those things where if I got to heaven or an afterlife and they gave you like a rundown of what you did, I think that would be like the one regret where I'm like, I spent how many hours?

I mean, I guess it's in the hundreds of hours range.

There's so many 80s yuppie karaoke videos where it's like a guy in a convertible and he's driving to like a bluff to go to his house on Malibu and he's got blondes in his car.

It's just like this weird 80s idea of excess and success.