Good evening, Kibitzers!
Nothing about doing stuff with my family is ever smooth or easily accomplished, so our ever-morphing plan to drive to freakin’ Canada (or thereabouts — we were actually headed to a Wal-Mart parking lot in Derby, Vermont, but that’s a whole other story) ANYWAY that plan had, by the 2:15-ish eclipse start time, turned into a plan to stand in the driveway with the cardboard glasses and watch the 93% eclipse until we got bored (around 3:45), then go inside and have a drink.
Whatever the downsides of this may have been, and they were legion, it must be said that “does not involve 8 or more hours of driving in a single day” is a substantial upside. I’m glad I went in 2017, on a much better-planned excursion that involved a different branch of my family, and my nephew promises me he’ll go in 2044. I cannot ask for more.
On Sunday morning, in the runup to the whole eclipse thing, someone at New Day Cafe (it was bleeding blue) posted the inevitable Total Eclipse of the Heart music video. (As an aside, I learned from The Marti that the songwriter and producer was Jim Steinman, who had also filled those roles for Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell album; this made the Tyler video make a LOT more sense to me.)
Anyway, my response was to post the “Literal Videos” version. And then I thought, “Surely I have done a KTK diary on these…?” But as far as I can tell, I have not. And once I started hunting for them, I remembered that they’re a genre, like Bardcore, rather than the work of a single artist, and as such, they’re quite uneven, and in their case, prone to frat-boy humor that can lead to eye-rolling in anyone older than a frat boy.
But, since I and apparently everyone else was much entertained on Sunday, I figured I’d see what I could round up. Certainly every other eclipse-adjacent theme will have been done to death by now! As you may have guessed, the deal here is, take the original video and replace the song’s lyrics with a literal account of what’s going on in the video. You can see right away that, the stranger the video, the better the literal version can be.
Let’s start with the original pair, which is one of the best: Gaynor Sullivan MBE’s Bonnie Tyler’s original 1983 Total Eclipse of the Heart… [5:33]
… and the literal-lyrics version by dascottjr, sung by Persephone Maewyn. [5:33]
I am not going to embed every original video, although I will link them, but I assure you that, no matter how weird the “literal” version seems, it is the original video, possibly a bit shortened, and only the audio has been tampered with, uh, enhanced.
I’m placing this one next because its creator says it’s the ur-literal-video that started the whole meme, and I have no reason to doubt it. This is DustoMcNeato’s version of a-ha’s 1985 Take On Me (links on song titles here will be the original videos). [3:47]
Also from DustoMcNeato: Billy Idol’s 1982 White Wedding. [3:10]
The majority of these songs are from the 80s, and I suppose that makes sense because music video, you may recall, exploded in the 80s when MTV appeared. But there is the occasional earlier one, like this one from 1979’s The Muppet Movie. It’s The Rainbow Connection, sung by Kermit the Frog, but sung here by Rob O'Hara. [3:20]
From Colin Surname, David Bowie’s 1980 Ashes to Ashes. [3:38]
From pie, Phil Collins’ 1981 In the Air Tonight. [4:49]
Let’s go a little later than the 80s: from Magma, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 Under The Bridge. [4:02]
Even a little later still! From Joel, Creed's 2000 With Arms Wide Open. I need to say here that I lied — this particular video does deviate from the original slightly, in that Scott Stapp is not, in fact, the Lion King and receives no visit from the spirit of Mufasa in the sky of the original video. [3:52]
Back to the 80s! From hbi2k, Elton John’s 1983 I'm Still Standing. [3:02]
To close, here’s one that was billed simply as another “literal” video, but this one flips the concept on its head — it uses the original lyrics in an entirely new video that is not even a music video; it’s a noir-ish crime drama. From Corridor Crew, it could only be Queen’s 1975 Bohemian Rhapsody. [5:07]
I feel like there should be a non-silly eclipse song, so I will end the diary with Norah Jones performing Black Hole Sun in Detroit in 2017, a few days after Chris Cornell’s death, by way of a tribute. If you have other eclipse (or non-eclipse) favorites, of course they’re welcome in the thread. [7:37]
Oh wait — I need to add this fabulous NASA JWST high-resolution image of the eclipse, with amazing detail on both the moon and the solar corona. If you can’t see the tweet, you can see the picture here.