Music Video
Bowie shot the video in Los Angeles in early 1987, and claimed it was "not going to sell the song at all," and was designed to explore music video as a storytelling format rather than promoting the song itself.
Julien Temple and Bowie co-directed the video, which made the song's message explicit, showing the young couple's struggle against an uncaring society, watched by a pair of angels through fake video cameras. This was banned by some TV stations (though contrary to popular belief, not the BBC, who showed the first part of the video on their Top of the Pops music show), even after edits removed the female protagonist's heavily implied rape, and an alternate version of a scene where the couple's child spells out "Mom", "Food" and "Fuck" in building blocks (representing the child's cycle of dependency; the alternate version had the child spell out the meaningless words "Mom", "Look" and "Luck") – as a result, EMI issued it on a video EP. The video was nominated for a 1987 MTV Video Music award in the category of "Best Male Video," but lost to Peter Gabriel's video for "Sledgehammer."
When Bowie heard of the video being banned, he stated: "I think it's ludicrous. got caught up in the usual yellow press kind of excitement because of what it looked like instead of what it said." He responded to later question about the controversy by making this statement:
We asked the LA police to work with us and they did very happily. We wanted to indicate how some of the houses for the homeless are removed, so we asked them to bring along the kind of contraption they use... it's kind of like a tank with a big battering ram on the end of it. And on the end of the battering ram they've made a little joke. As it goes through the windows it goes "Have a nice day." And I pointed out that it would be in the video and they said they were only too pleased to keep it on, so they kept it on. Is that controversial? I don't know." —March 1987Read more about this topic: Day-In Day-Out
Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“I think sometimes, could I only have music on my own terms; could I live in a great city and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,—that were a bath and a medicine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)