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Van Halen clip: The fact that the band is currently playing in an absurd dinosaur setting fits perfectly
Dinosaurs are universally popular, and rightly so: the younger ones are in love with them because they match fantasy and reality congruently (apart from the girdle, perhaps) - and because many young people are first introduced to the complex, gradually opening dinopedia The joys and consolations of the encyclopedic opened.
The older ones, especially those with a tendency to melancholy, sympathize with the primeval lizards with a slight jealousy: Sure, it didn't end well for them, but hey: They've already got through all the misery for it.
Now a video of the hairstyle rock band Van Halen, believed to be lost for decades, has surfaced, in which they perform their song "So This is Love?" From 1981 at the feet of a somewhat pug-loving Brontosaurus.
A Tyrannosaurus Rex figure sometimes looks curiously out of a bush, a few times the camera pans to a Neanderthal figure. Against this backdrop, singer David Lee Roth goes about his day's work very seriously. He wears a blonde mane of minipli, a piano scarf (similar to the model that later hung around David Hasselhoff's neck when he was singing the wall), an open gown, leggings-like trousers and colorful fringed cuffs.
Bassist Michael Anthony wears orange prison overalls, the brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen are dressed in red and blue and white striped shirts that artistic chimpanzees usually wear, Eddie combines white knickers so that you can see his matching striped knee socks. The main focus is of course on the singer, who tries a kind of pole dance on a giant lizard leg and then kicks his hips to climb the dinosaur's tail.
Nothing could be less relevant today than this video, if you could ruin your game if you have no heart for your undisputed potential to be touched. There is the disarming shabbiness of the desolate dinosaur park on the one hand and Roth's flamboyant genital swagger on the other: With such extremely explicit second-skin pants as he wears in the video, Damiano David, the always infallibly dressed sex singer of this year's Italian ESC winner Måneskin, would at best get away.
In fact, it was the Italian Van Halen fan club that now shared the dinosaur video on YouTube and provided a little context: in 1995, photos from the shoot appeared for the first time and were published in the official Van Halen magazine "The Inside".
At the time, however, it was assumed that the images were relics of a music video shoot that was finally discarded in the editing room.
Many fan myths have since been made about the lost material, which was actually recordings for the Italian television show "Happy Circus", which was filmed in November 1981 in the Dinopark of Rivolta d'Adda near Milan, when Van Halen was in the process were on a promotional tour for their album »Fair Warning«.
What's next?
A lost video of David Bowie, in which he kicking and rolling in a trough full of tapir babies?
The fact that the band is currently playing in an absurd dinosaur setting fits perfectly in retrospect.
After all, this little film was surprisingly lifted from the holdings of docked TV archives in the same way that one normally comes across dinosaur remains when digging.
Even if one is only moderately interested in the cinematic oeuvre of Van Halen, this case feeds the hope that there may be more rock-and-pop archaeological excavations - a lost video by David Bowie in which he struggles wallowing in a trough full of tapir babies, or apocryphal song lyrics for an entire themed album on which Paul McCartney sings about his bobtail Martha.
It is a funny coincidence that the Van Halen video appeared on Twitter almost at the same time as a little dinosaur Heckmeck.
A mother had posted a picture of a cake with a dinosaur decoration there, and someone had raged underneath it with a lot of tweet that dinosaurs were ugly, whoever loved them had lost all reference to reality, was like an Islamist in this way of thinking, and also made cake fat.
It was not possible to finally clarify whether the postings came from a particularly poor Wuttropf, or whether someone had just made fun of it, playing through the keyboard of the swelling troll rhetoric in a playful and exemplary manner.
In contrast, the dinosaur video is a relic from a world in which there was only analogue and therefore much more elaborate rabble, in which you might roll your eyes when you saw this silliness and stylistic perky idea on TV, but left it at that, because everything else would not have been worth the expense - and slept well afterwards anyway. In a land before our time.
