Herbie Hancock “Rockit” video

First things first–greatest video of the 1980s, hands down. Hands up, too. Our man Herbie, who never shied away from trying something new (which unfortunately led to this), dipped his toe, and Godley and Creme dipped some prosthetic limbs, into the nascent realm of electronic industrial hip-hop, to stunning result. The music is what it is–the sound of hip-hop being publicly reborn a few years after first taking shape. It’s dark, funky and a little bit groundbreaking, if not derided by the purist faction.

But the video is what’s still incredibly intriguing–reappropriating the jerky rhythms of breakdancing through a house full of sentient limbs in as Freudian a manner as the battle with female mannequin parts at the end of Kubrick’s The Killer’s Kiss. The torso-less female legs led by a jib through a living room, the omnipresent kicking legs and the violently rising and falling bed denizen. The strangely calm faces of the mannequins. The cheesy back-and-forth editing along with the scratching. All dated, sure. But they’re subsumed by the larger theme of the piece–a decidedly domestic environment populated not only by non-humans, but very visibly mechanized things that are made to look human, and the only person allowed inside (Hancock) is transmitted via television, because MTV was afraid to show black people not named Michael Jackson. It’s Uncanny Domestic Robot Hip-Hop. And I should only mention in passing that this gave me weeks of nightmares after I first saw it, but I still managed to send weekly postcards to MTV, requesting it.