I miss the strut. It's been so long in the music video world since we've had a music video that showcases this seemingly lost art form, even while strut-worthy songs like Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" sit high on our Billboard charts. I'm not talking about swag, I'm taking about strut. It's totally different.
So to get our recommended dose of strut, we need to look to the past. Today we're going all the way back to 1987 to watch one of the strut classic, "Keep On Lovin' Me" by The Whispers.
The idea behind this music video is simple: five grown men reading newspapers on a street all notice a woman with nice gams (legs) and spend the rest of the video slowly strutting after her as a group. Somewhere along the line they go to a party. If you think about it, it's the perfect showcase for the strut, and we get to watch it from the best view - from the front moving backwards.
We love this video for so many reasons. One of the top reasons is the sheet banality and randomness of the locations where the strut happens. According to this extremely informative thread on - wait for it - soulstrut.com, the video starts out in front of the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, CA. Here's a map if you want to go and lay some flowers.
They then take a meandering, random journey around a park in Century City, which appears to have been remodeled since this video came out. It is as nondescript a location as you can possibly find in a music video, but maybe that helps us learn that strutting can be done anywhere. You don't need to be somewhere fancy to strut - you can do it literally anywhere.
Sidenote: if there was an international symbol for the 1980s, it would neon lines on a white wall, which is exactly what the party the gentlemen go to features as decoration.
The Whispers are an interesting group. They enjoyed a ridiculously long career and made some great music videos (more will be on the site soon). I'm sure you'll see them on this blog series again, but today, we salute them for a great strut showcase and hope for a strut comeback in 2013.
