Musical Monday with Richard Marx

This week's Musical Monday selection is a tragic tale, told through song and an excellent music video. It might have been perfect--since it's artfully done and features real actors, since it's as much a short film/silent movie as it is a music video, but it suffers from a flaw all-too-common with videos from the time it was made.

Check it out... and then read more about what I view as flaws in this work if you feel so inclined. (Otherwise, I wish you a good week... and I hope your circumstances are better than those the characters in "Hazard" find themselves in...)


Hazard (1992)
Starring: Richard Marks, Robert Conrad, Renee Parent, and Jennifer O'Neill
Director: Michael Haussman
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

At some point during late 1980s and early 1990s, it seems someone decided that it wasn't enough for some music videos to be mini-silent movies--they had to add dialogue and disrupt the song that they ostensibly existed to promote. The otherwise excellent video for Richard Marx's "Hazard" (perhaps the grimmest song he ever recorded) is marred by such needless additions.

In the case "Hazard", the spoken lines are disruptive but doesn't ruin the overall experience of watching the video, as is the case with entirely too many music videos of that period. (I think people were probably trying to capture the accolades and success of pieces of Michael Jackson's "Thriller"... but didn't realize that ones like that worked because the song was featured as part of a mini-movie that was built around it and woven through it.)

It could also be that here someone felt that the cost of having well-established actors appearing along side Richard Marx instead of the usual models and musicians required some lines to be spoken.

Whatever the reasons, an otherwise excelling little silent movie that carried the story of "Hazard" perfectly fine is interrupted by a spoken exchange between Marx and Conrad, which also disrupts the flow of the song--something else that doesn't happen when this is done well. (Again, I refer everyone back to "Thriller".)