Jean Genie
June 13, 2011 3:53 AM   Subscribe

Jazzin' For Blue Jean is a 20 minute long David Bowie music video directed by Julian Temple.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn (34 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh yes, the one where David Bowie steals David Bowie's date. Awesome. I think MTV aired this, or was it Night Flight? It was probably Night Flight. Or it was on TV 61?
posted by Catblack at 4:04 AM on June 13, 2011


I saw this on rage the other night - a pleasant surprise as I'd somehow missed it over the past 20 years of Bowie fandom.
posted by not the fingers, not the fingers at 4:08 AM on June 13, 2011


I remember when this premiered. There was a period of time when MTV played the whole thing, and then they started just playing the Blue Jean music video, which was an edit of the original film.

One girl in my circle in high school even bought the VHS of the film. She was totally in love with Bowie, so it made sense.
posted by hippybear at 4:11 AM on June 13, 2011


Even the awesomeness of David Bowie couldn't make the 1980's cool.
posted by three blind mice at 4:40 AM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm loving the alien!
posted by punkfloyd at 4:42 AM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


God, Bowie was great at acting the loser.
posted by bwg at 4:57 AM on June 13, 2011


Oh, and watching the video suddenly reminds me of how much David Bowie and Ricky Gervais sound alike.
posted by bwg at 5:14 AM on June 13, 2011


I saw this on rage the other night - a pleasant surprise as I'd somehow missed it over the past 20 years of Bowie fandom.

Yeah, I missed it when it aired but I got it via Neil Gaiman's twitter about it. Hope they put the footage of him and Amanda Palmer hosting RAGE online somewhere.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 5:36 AM on June 13, 2011


I heard Ricky Gervais tell a story in an interview about how has met Bowie and became friends (to some extent) with him. Anyways, on Bowie's birthday, Gervais sent him an email saying something to the effect of:

"Happy Birthday - time to get a real job!
Yours,
Rick Gervais,
Comedian"

To which Bowie replied:

"I have a real job.
Yours,
David Bowie,
Rock God".
posted by the quidnunc kid at 5:36 AM on June 13, 2011 [8 favorites]


If you rub him the right way will he do a little magic dance?
posted by New England Cultist at 5:54 AM on June 13, 2011


I remember watching this when it premiered on MTV. So in love with the coolness that was David Bowie I fully thought: people will no longer applaud. They will snap.
posted by dog food sugar at 5:57 AM on June 13, 2011 [2 favorites]


Even the awesomeness of David Bowie couldn't make the 1980's cool.

There were many cool things in the eighties - eighties Bowie was not one of them.
posted by the noob at 6:15 AM on June 13, 2011 [3 favorites]


Wow, thanks for this!

All I need now is the full length version of Mick Jagger's "Just Another Night" with Rae Dawn Chong.
posted by Trurl at 7:34 AM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


Cocaine. It's a hell of an awesome drug.

I'll actually rep for 80s Bowie, to an extent - although massively less cool that 70s Bowie, 90s Bowie or 2000s Bowie, he did do some interesting things. As albums, Tonight and Never Let Me Down are largely forgettable, but he's still doing interesting things with video direction, making short films, appearing in largely quite bad movies... in a sense, 80s Bowie is a sort of end-of-level boss, Nega-Ninja version of the all-rounder, singing, dancing, acting variety show Bowie he could so easily have become if The Laughing Gnome had been his first big hit rather than Space Oddity.
posted by running order squabble fest at 7:51 AM on June 13, 2011 [3 favorites]


There were many cool things in the eighties - eighties Bowie was not one of them.

Oh baby, just you shut your mouth.
posted by adipocere at 8:22 AM on June 13, 2011 [15 favorites]


I remember what a big PR deal this album and single were. There were video singles for this song, blue vinyl 45s and 12" singles of 'Blue Jean' as well as massive, cathedral cut-out standing displays for this song that appeared at every record shop everywhere.

It didn't help sales of the album and singles much, but all that blue certainly was pretty.
posted by yellowcandy at 8:46 AM on June 13, 2011


Sorry, I couldn't help but enjoy this. I realize that 80s Bowie made some missteps, but I really do dig how this feels so much of its era.
posted by Kitteh at 9:17 AM on June 13, 2011


Nice blast from the past! Thanks.
posted by Mister_A at 9:29 AM on June 13, 2011


1980s Bowie's recorded output included: Ashes to Ashes, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), Ashes to Ashes, Cat People (Putting Out Fire), Under Pressure, Let's Dance, Modern Love, China Girl, This is Not America.

The 1980s were awesome to the extent you are aware of what was awesome. If your understanding of the 1980s is limited to Journey, Back to the Future, and John Hughes movies then the 1980s *will* be found wanting. Not that those things can't be fun, entertaining, and good, but they are not the sum total.
posted by artlung at 9:45 AM on June 13, 2011 [2 favorites]


I remember when MTV used to show this in its entirety. My Mom had a huge crush on David Bowie back then and had most of the "Jazzin'" dialog memorized. To this day if I mention to her that I have to attend a function and meet people and I'm nervous, she'll remind me: "Just walk up and say ''Ello Vic, 'ow's it goin'?"
posted by Oriole Adams at 9:46 AM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


If you rub him the right way will he do a little magic dance?

Yes. Just don't do it in the streets.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:12 AM on June 13, 2011 [1 favorite]


Don't know how y'all can slag 80s Bowie. I still get chills when I hear Ashes To Ashes...
posted by SNACKeR at 10:52 AM on June 13, 2011


This is how.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:56 AM on June 13, 2011


Bowie and Springsteen both put out albums at the beginning of the eighties (Scary Monsters and The River, respectively) that I thought were jaw-droppingly awesome, followed by albums (Let's Dance and Born in the USA) that... weren't. I've since revised my opinion on Born in the USA, which I have to admit was borne at the time partially out of the Pumped-Up Bruce image (and that silly video with Courtney Cox); after all, he also put out Nebraska, a brilliantly bleak solo record that he recorded in his kitchen, at about the same time. I might similarly revise my opinion of Bowie's eighties catalog with a fresh listen. At the time, my two favorite post-Scary Monsters songs of his--the Giorgio Moroder version of the Cat People theme and the theme to Absolute Beginners--were done outside his own solo work. (Ditto for "Under Pressure", of course, and even that "Dancing in the Streets" duet he did with Mick Jagger for Live Aid.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:17 AM on June 13, 2011


Wow. Saw this at the cinema when it came out. Stranglely, I remember this, but not whatever film we had gone to see.

Also: Julian Temple? Didn't he direct "Absolute beginners"? And wasn't he Tenpole Tudor singing "Who Killed Bambi?" in The Swindle, and "Swords of a Thousand Men?"
posted by marienbad at 11:31 AM on June 13, 2011


This is also available in its entirety as an easter egg on the Best of Bowie DVD.
posted by geckoinpdx at 1:00 PM on June 13, 2011


Richard Fairbrass, one of "Right Said Fred" (yes, the "I'm Too Sexy" chaps) plays Screaming Lord Byron's bass player.
posted by John Shaft at 4:17 PM on June 13, 2011


1980s Bowie's recorded output included: Ashes to Ashes, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), Ashes to Ashes, Cat People (Putting Out Fire), Under Pressure, Let's Dance, Modern Love, China Girl, This is Not America.

You've forgotten to mention his work for Labyrinth, some of his most catchy and somehow still strangest material of the decade.
posted by hippybear at 4:22 PM on June 13, 2011


The 1980s were awesome to the extent you are aware of what was awesome. If your understanding of the 1980s is limited to Journey, Back to the Future, and John Hughes movies then the 1980s *will* be found wanting. Not that those things can't be fun, entertaining, and good, but they are not the sum total.

There are things better than Back to the Future?
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 5:00 PM on June 13, 2011


God, Bowie was great at acting the loser.

I felt that Bowie was kinda annoying trying to act like a generic civilian. He was always at his best playing with masks and personas. When he dropped them to try to portray just a regular guy, I wasn't as interested in his new songs anymore.

But Bowie is still great, because he did a deadly brilliant live show when I saw him in 1999, despite my reservations.
posted by ovvl at 5:06 PM on June 13, 2011


As a diehard Bowie fanboy, I always have a hard time consider Scary Monsters as 80's Bowie - it's a damn shame that it didn't herald a new direction, and Let's Dance did instead. It took Tin Machine for him to break out of that funk.

Most disappointing has been the total disappearance of Bowie from the musical world post-heart attack.
posted by HotPants at 5:25 PM on June 13, 2011


Also: Julian Temple? Didn't he direct "Absolute beginners"? And wasn't he Tenpole Tudor singing "Who Killed Bambi?" in The Swindle, and "Swords of a Thousand Men?"

Yes and no, respectively. The frontman of Tenpole Tudor was Ed Tudor-Pole.

Angle bracket style equals sign "Patrick Bateman" close angle brackets...

I don't tend to think of "Scary Monsters" as 80s Bowie - it was released in 1980, so something of an edge case, but thematically it was a development of the Berlin albums, and the Tony Visconti production again locates it in the 70s tradition for me. This is possibly a high-falutin' way of saying that it's too good to be 80s Bowie, but there you go.

"Let's Dance", then, is the first 80s Bowie album for me, and it's actually really good ("Criminal World", "Let's Dance", "China Girl", "Shake It", "Ricochet", "Cat People", "Without You"), but has a feeling of incompleteness (there is interesting stuff going on, though - the recent popularity of tUnE-YarDs is interesting, since she really sounds a _lot_ like the album a parallel-universe Bowie made between Lodger and Let's Dance, having been abducted into the future, Legion of Super Heroes style).

After that, "Tonight" and "Never Let Me Down" were proper disappointments - with the odd standout track ("Loving the Alien", "Time Will Crawl") getting lost in a lot of noodling, some peculiarly half-hearted experiments with world music and too many cover versions. As Hippybear says, those bookended the soundtrack to Labyrinth, which is actually a lot of fun; you can see how much more engaged he is with the project than he is with his quote-unquote proper musical career at that point.

"Tin Machine" polarizes opinion. It sounds like it was fun to do, and it feels like it was a useful head-clearer before "Black Tie, White Noise", "The Buddha of Suburbia" and "1. Outside" in the 90s - when he started reengaging with weirdness. However, I am pretty glad that lyrics like "They're just a load of assholes/with buttholes for their brains" did not signpost a new direction. "Bus Stop" is nice, though.

And meanwhile, you've got him finding other things apparently more interesting - Baal for the BBC, Labyrinth, a surprising number of films of wildly varying quality but his appearance in which were often cheering... on the whole, it feels like a decade where Bowie lost interest in music, and in particular in quality control, but there's a good mix tape's worth of good stuff across the albums.
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:05 PM on June 13, 2011


He looks so young! Also, lol at the Frankie Relax T-shirt, and the voice.
posted by DanCall at 12:46 AM on June 14, 2011


Also, lol at the Frankie Relax T-shirt

Hey, don't you go around laughing at Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
posted by hippybear at 3:40 AM on June 14, 2011


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