Armond White on PUBLIC ENEMY’s “Night Of The Living Baseheads” Music Video – Part 11 (Dir: Lionel C. Martin)

 

(Part 11) SAT July 28, 2007. SCANNERS 2007 Video Festival. Film Society of Lincoln Center in NYC. Walter Reade Theater. CRITIC Armond White’s “Official History of Music Video: An Introspective” Presentation (15th Annual).

PANTHEON Exhibit A (Part 11)
CRITIC Armond White on
PUBLIC ENEMY “Night Of The Living Baseheads”
Director: Lionel C. Martin

Here’s an excerpt:

“…Night of the Living Baseheads
Confirmation that music videos were something more than advertisements for pop singles came with a quintessentially New York story: the 1988 release of Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” As directed by Lionel Martin, founder of the New York production house Classic Concepts, the outfit that gave first chances to iconic directors Hype Williams, Paul Hunter, the “Baseheads” video broke new ground. It presented the music video as a form of social expression from the subculture of hip-hop music.

Martin and P.E. producer Hank Shocklee conceived “Baseheads” as a modern reflection of television’s mainstream as encountered by hip-hop radicalism. They used news footage of crack houses and homeless crackheads to set the stage for comic depictions of a TV news program (PE-TV), plus commercials, interview segments with victimized ghetto families, the fantasy of PE as a superhero group abducted by hip-hop-phobes, yet breaking free with the news of black America in crisis.

It was postmodern as all get out, but its postmodernism also verified that music video could be a vital response to the pabulum Hollywood at that time (as today) was feeding the American public with offal, like Die Hard, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Working Girl. The satire and sincerity in “Baseheads” effectively countered the disingenuousness and outright falsehoods of those feature films. Music video watchers were thrust ahead of the cultural curve but were provided fresh insight into contemporary social issues—teased into using their political imaginations.

Shocklee explains “Baseheads'” radical-seeming approach as, “We wanted to do something original. If people wanted to hear the record, they could play the record. But when they watch the video we want them to see it as a separate and original thing.” All the great hip-hop videos that reported daily life and political drama—Bushwick Bill’s “Ever So Clear,” Ice Cube’s “Dead Homiez,” Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop”—all derive from the revolutionary “Baseheads.” …”

Armond White can be reached courtesy of the weekly, the New York Press

Here are a few quotes from Armond White regarding this music video:

“Opens with a postmodern parody of politicized television — PETV — to relay rap’s new pop revolution.”

Night Of The Living Baseheads is “…the first music film for PE that translates its radical state of the art musical strategies – – scratching, sampling, and agit-prop lyrics — into visual terms.”

“…using the premise of a pirate news broadcast of the fictitious PE-TV, the clip is one-third movie parody, two-thirds alarm at the social devastation of crack and cocaine (freebasing). PE’s urgency keeps their seriousness from being ponderous. Yet the video has the jolt of a televised newsflash. Martin moves from in-studio anchor-room scenes to shots of Chuck D and co-rapper Flavor Flav, real and fake documentary footage, and a satirical commercial for telephone-paging beepers (now considered dealers’ paraphernalia).”

The City Sun, April/May 1989 “Lionel Martin: An Auteur Is Born”