It's a Duran Duran World
MTV’s success allowed for an important development in the marketing of music stars, inextricably linking their performance talent with their image. Not every band was crazy about becoming film stars mainly because not everyone is photogenic. Producer Paul Flattery confirmed that “video did kill the radio star. It was like when the talkies happened and actors lost their careers if they didn’t have a good voice” (Tannenbaum and Marks 68). In effect, each music video became a smaller scale version of a Hollywood star vehicle. Richard Dyer, in his book Stars, writes:
In this new paradigm, a band or performer who could successfully develop a unique and engaging visual style had a big advantage. Thus the immediate effect of MTV was the second “British Invasion”, the success of British synthpop groups, dubbed New Wave in America. A crowning example of these groups’ style was the Human League, whose “Don’t You Want Me” video was directed by “Billie Jean” director and music video auteur Steve Barron. On this phenomenon, Tannenbaum and Marks write, “When Duran Duran or Eurythmics videos aired in the same hour as Journey or REO Speedwagon , it was the Brits who seemed brighter, bolder, and more captivating” (85). As Duran Duran’s Raiders of the Lost Ark-style video for “Hungry Like the Wolf” demonstrated, music video was a powerful cinematic medium waiting to be exploited to its full potential by a truly magnetic star. This is essentially what happened, as Starr and Waterman note, “By the middle of the decade, when the industry began to climb out of its hole, it was clear that the recovery was due more to the spectacular success of a few recordings by superstar musicians--Michael Jackson, Madonna,... and others--than to any across-the-board improvement in record sales” (450). It was Jackson’s immaculate image, as the cute kid from the Jackson 5, the best actor in The Wiz (1977), and the narrator of the E.T. audiobook (1982), that allowed him to flourish as a star. His crossover appeal catapulted his album Thriller, with its deliberate collaborations with Paul McCartney (“The Girl is Mine” and “Say Say Say”) and Eddie Van Halen (“Beat It”), to its vaunted perch in pop culture history.Vehicles are important as much for what conventions they set up as for how they develop them, for their ingredients as for their realisation. In certain respects, a set of star vehicles is rather like a film genre such as the Western, the musical or the gangster film. As with genres proper, one can discern across a star’s vehicles continuities of iconography (e.g. how they are dressed, made-up and coiffed, performance mannerisms, the settings with which they are associated), visual style (e.g. how they are lit, photographed, placed within the frame) and structure (e.g. their role in the plot, their function in the film’s symbolic pattern). (62)
