What is that mystery fruit?
INXS
Core memory unlocked: INXS’s video for “The One Thing” haunted me then, and it haunts me now. From that golden MTV time of 82-83 (the song is from Shabooh Shoobah, released in Australia in 1982, but I don’t think US audiences heard/saw it until 1983) where everything was filmed on a white backdrop for about a hundred dollars, “The One Thing” video is basically a Roman orgy without all the penetration. I knew this on some level as a kid, and it made me feel gloriously awkward, like I was definitely seeing something that I wasn’t supposed to see. There was more debauchery here than I saw in clandestine films like Porky’s and Hardbodies. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the band’s name makes perfect sense.
If you recall, the video is front man par excellence Michael Hutchence and the boys sharing a delectable feast with drugged up cats and Playboy models. Hutchence — with his curly locks, preternatural pout, and dark fuck-me eyes — slithers around in a black hat that accentuates his cheek bones, and he’s the living embodiment of sex or maybe Jim Morrison reincarnated. Oh, that’s just during the choruses. For the verses, he’s in a grey jacket combo darting in and out between party guests, moaning the lyrics at the women, who are (improbably) ignoring him and munching on vaginas (fresh figs, I think).
Guitarist Tim Farriss is probably the other star of the video – and the only thing he does is play the simple guitar riff in uncomfortable close-ups about 53 times with the head of the guitar pointed right through the camera. His hair is lusciously greasy, and he looks like he’s having a fucking blast with his red shirt, sneer, and pointed boots splayed behind him. I can only imagine the director shouting at him: “PLAY IT AGAIN! MORE SNEER!” I also quite like visual of Kirk Pengilly – playing the awful sax solo – writhing around on the floor while spit likely backwashes into his face.
The fun really starts on the last chorus. As the song reaches a sexual climax (I know it’s obvious, but this was the eighties), everyone at the table ratchets up the intensity by tearing apart pieces of wet, grotesque turkey and some giant bread thing that looks like a pillow filled with attic insulation as cats wander around wondering what the hell is going on. One band member just says “fuck it” and climbs on the table to tear at the food while the models shove grapes into everyone’s mouths. Michael just sits at the head of the table, satisfied at what he’s done. Then a helmet-haired model chews a piece of fig in close-up and very deliberately sets it down on the table. It’s a vagina, people. I didn’t know that at the time, yet I knew this food/fruit was being presented to me in a dirty, titillating way. I had no idea what they were eating at the time. I still kind of don’t; I just read years ago that it was a fig or maybe a papaya or pomegranate. Whatever it is, no American kid ever saw anything like it, and it sits there on the table all alone after all this chaos, looking slimy, warm, and inviting, and American kids took this image into their brains and tried to make something of it. I was scared of the thing…like, what the fuck is that? The video ends with Farriss playing the riff again and then fades out with our dinner guests eating normally before the chaos explodes.
There is probably no other video in MTV history that says “early MTV” more than this one. Mysterious, shoddy, simple yet packed with unexplained (for me at the time) meaning, filled with good-looking dudes who are kind of threatening and clearly not clean-cut Americans, “The One Thing” clip personifies personal discoveries that Gen X kids had to pretty much make and interpret on their own. It’s a deliriously entertaining clip, and if you want to see Gen X in a nutshell just head over to YouTube and read the comments underneath it. Everyone wants to go back, take me back, back when music was fun and innocent (!), this is what magic sounds like, who here agrees there was no better era than the early eighties, etc.
The comments become more mournful the more you dig with pleas to God for us to collectively wake up and discover that the last forty years were just a bad dream. Any eighties video will throw you down the rabbit hole that you only yank yourself out of with herculean effort. That most of the videos of this era can be watched and mooned over in this way almost seems unhealthy even if I identify with every single comment and feel like I’ve found my people. We all went through the same things, and that draws us together like every generation feels when they are with their own. But how many generations enjoyed such an intense, confusing melding of images and brazen come-ons during our formative years?
God bless pre-The Real World MTV, who gave us bands like INXS and stars like Hutchence. We all know how he died, so let’s just enjoy the amazing hit singles (other than “Never Tear Us Apart” – see the “Music to Kill Myself By” segment) that made them rivals to Duran Duran, U2, and other huge bands of the day.
As a song, “The One Thing” still rips. Drummer Jon Farriss does my favorite thing drummers do in songs: He fills the choruses with syncopated, tribal rhythms, never fully letting the song release, building tension, until the last chorus when he bursts forth with a straight beat that is the sonic equivalent of Bender raising his fist at the end of The Breakfast Club. It’s a triumphant dynamic that I keep searching for in new songs. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, or maybe I just don’t want to find it.
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