‘Numb’ Can’t Send Guitarist Over the Edge

N umbness isn’t the easiest quality to visualize in a rock video, even if it’s what most of them inevitably produce as a byproduct. But U2 and director Kevin Godley do their Dadaist darndest to deliberately approximate anesthetizing in the video that tops this edition of Sound & Vision, in which recent pop clips of note are rounded up and rated on a 0-100 scale.

But if U2 has a lock on this month’s top slot, the spotlighted director this time around is most definitely Michel Gondry, who helmed the videos by the two closest runners-up, Terence Trent D’Arby and Bjork. Do watch for Gondry’s name in those MTV credit blocks: It’s a guarantee of highly imaginative art direction and unusually seductive special effects.

U2, “Numb.” The Irish quartet’s uncharacteristic current single, featuring a rare lead vocal by guitarist the Edge, is a monotonic, mechanical-sounding paean to playing dead. (Although it’s got a good beat and you can almost dance to it.) The clever video interpretation is a single-shot, no-edit affair in which Edge sits and recites the lines as imperviously as possible while a succession of bandmates, seductresses and wanton strangers torture or try to distract him. It’s the rock ‘n’ roll version of “Make Me Laugh.”

Only once does Edge almost lose his composure, when a little girl attempts to slap him silly. Otherwise he’s stone-visaged as bassist Adam Clayton blows smoke in his face, two gals clean his ears out with their tongues, fans come up and snap Polaroids, the straps of his tank top are snipped off, women play violent footsie with his cheeks, his face is wrapped up in rope, etc. In some ways this is obviously supposed to represent a few of the desensitizing effects of stardom, but, as a good comedy of humiliation, it has Edge standing in for any of us who might feel our-selves getting a little too thick-skinned in the face of all the bombardments the ‘90s might offer.

By the way, this video offers one of the riskier gambits we’ve seen on TV in awhile: a seemingly endless stretch--actually, it’s only 20 seconds--during the instrumental bridge in which the Edge and all the other players go off-camera and the screen is completely dark. Maybe that’s U2’s cheeky way of doing its part in offering an ever-so-brief respite from so much numbing sensory overload. 88

Terence Trent D’Arby, “She Kissed Me,” and Bjork, “Human Behaviour.” In the pop video world, director Michel Gondry looks to be the new Jean-Baptiste Mondino, judging from these two superlative clips. (He’s also responsible for a third video currently airing, Lenny Kravitz’s “Believe,” which looks equally fine but accompanies such a dopey song it’s difficult to sit through.)

In Gondry’s scenario for D’Arby’s randy rock guitar anthem, “She Kissed Me” is the name of an old-style sexploitation flick, playing in a theater to which a box-office lady has denied a young boy entrance. But that doesn’t stop the kid’s imagination from running wild as he gapes at the racy lobby cards, which come to life and even interact with one another. The multiple frame-within-a-frame special effects are both funny and dazzling. And the video, rather than seeming unduly lascivious, comes off as a fond tribute to the days when those too young to get into Roger Corman pictures had to stare at the stills and fantasize about just what saucy things might be ensuing on the big screen.

“Human Behaviour” is a much more abstract, atmospheric clip, incredibly spooky in its absurd fashion: Watch it just before bedtime and you’ll swear you’re already dreaming. While Sugarcube-gone-solo Bjork wails about humanity’s animal nature, she’s pursued through some highly stylized woods by a giant teddy bear; she ends up swallowed and squatting in the bear’s tummy, while in other scenes the bear is seen crouching inside her head. The shots in which the menacing teddy’s pursuit is matched with the ominous timpani in the song, and a very pesky housefly’s buzz is matched with a burst of distorted guitar, are as fine a marriage of music and weird video as you’ll see this season. Both videos: 87

Bryan Ferry, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” When the Shirelles first hit with this Gerry Goffin-Carole King song in 1961, it was the timid query of a young girl desperate for assurance that her virginity wouldn’t go down in vain. It’s amazing how thoroughly Ferry transforms the tune here into something much more melancholy, growing it up and turning it into--of all things--a sugar daddy’s lament.

His co-star in this video is Guess? girl and Playmate of the Year Anna Nicole Smith, whose negligee is holding in her famously ample form about as precariously as an Iowa levee contains the Mississippi. There’s enough of her on display that the video should be sexier, but as Smith and suit-clad Ferry lounge around a spacious penthouse--she reading magazines on the bed, he playing solitaire at a long executive table--there’s even more weary loneliness than cleavage on parade. Who ever figured classic lines like “Can I believe the magic of your sighs?” would end up not as the worry of a teen naif but the Angst of an aging mistress-keeper? 72

Donald Fagen, “Tomorrow’s Girls,” and Porno for Pyros, “Pets.” Humanity’s enslavement by imperialist alien races is the theme of both of these playful tunes--though Porno for Pyros is concerned with the passivity of our species as a whole and Fagen is merely toying around with classic gynephobia.

In “Tomorrow’s Girls,” Fagen reiterates the most paranoid of sci-fi conspiracy theories: Women are actually creatures from outer space --or “a virus wearing pumps and pearls,” as he puts it. The video stars Rick Moranis as a suburban husband who dreams of seduction by--and subjugation to--the model-pretty invading race, who, naturally, have transmitters hidden in their makeup cases.

Perry Farrell is much too cool for such mock misogyny. His Pyros’ “Pets” postulates that humans as a whole make swell followers, with “maybe Martians” as the benefactors of our subservience. (But is it just a coincidence or the directors’ deliberate “Rising Sun”-style racial paranoia that has the line “Will there be another race to come along and take over for us” immediately followed by a shot of what appear to be six Japanese men, in formation?)

The Porno clip is OK, but best viewed as part of MTV’s “Beavis and Butt-head” series, where you get the voice-over of the two animated title characters hyperventilating when the shot comes on of a female bodybuilder doing the splits while in a handstand. “Girls”: 69 . . . . . “Pets”: 65

Ice Cube, “Check Yo Self.” Remember the strangely inconclusive ending to Ice Cube’s last video, “It Was a Good Day,” wherein the quintessential gangsta rapper was surrounded on his front lawn by a battery of lawmen on the ground and in the air? Turns out that cliffhanger was just the setup for this sequel, in which the now-busted Cube dons prison grays and does a stint in the pen before making a jailbreak with the help of a sympathetic female guard.

But although this video is at least as well made as the one before (both were directed by Cube himself), it isn’t getting the same kind of MTV saturation airplay as its predecessor, for obvious reasons: It’s a textbook example of politically incorrect “homophobia.” Early on, Cube is menaced by a hulking prison bully, who eventually--we’re made to presume--gets dragged off somewhere to be gang-raped, only to come back as a prancing, limp-wristed, prissy homosexual stereotype of no possible remaining danger to our antihero.

Curiously, most of the free-speech advocates who usually rush to rap’s defense on any other volatile issue still look the other way when it comes to gay slurs. 22

UB40, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and AC/DC, “Big Gun.” You can run from “Sliver” and “Last Action Hero,” film fans, but you can’t hide. Lord save us from the rock videos that linger on, continuing to promote the already dead movie dogs of summer. And the advertisement-like hit videos by UB40 and AC/DC are outlasting their theatrical counterparts by a long shot.

UB40’s warm reggae update of Elvis’ ballad classic is completely at odds with the cold, voyeuristic imagery from “Sliver,” an example of the commercial marriage of movies and music at its most incongruously stupid.

AC/DC’s metal is obviously better suited to the numskull excerpts from “Action Hero.” And proto-salesman Arnold, as is his fashion lately, even puts in a token cameo appearance at the video’s end, dressed up-- har-har --in full Angus Young regalia, though in shorts he looks more like Alfred E. Neuman than the famous guitarist. For those about to retch, we salute you. Both videos: 20