Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Music: Iggy Pop/Ryuichi Sakamoto - Risky

In the late 1980's I had a copy of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Neo Geo Album. I really loved the music on it and this single I still sing to myself.

From Wikipedia:

In 1987, Pop appeared (along with Bootsy Collins) on a mostly instrumental album, Neo Geo by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. The music video for "Risky", written and directed by Meiert Avis, won the first ever MTV "Breakthrough Video Award". The ground breaking video explores (Persian: فریدون اسفندیاری)'s, transhumanist philosopher FM-2030's ideas of "Nostalgia for the Future", in the form of an imagined love affair between a robot and one of Man Ray's models in Paris in the late 1930's. Additional inspiration was drawn from Jean Baudrillard, Edvard Munch's 1894 painting "Puberty", and Roland Barthes " Death of the Author". The surrealist black and white video uses stop motion, light painting, and other retro in-camera effects techniques. Meiert Avis shot Sakamoto while at work on the score for "The Last Emperor" in London. Sakamoto also also appears in the video painting words and messages to an open shutter camera. Iggy Pop, who performs the vocals on "Risky", chose not appear to in the video, allowing his performance space to be occupied by the surrealist era robot.





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