For most of my life, Blue Öyster Cult has meant a lot to me. It’s the first rock music I can remember hearing; my parents knew how much Tiny Matt loved Godzilla, and gave him a cassette copy of Spectres, on which BÖC’s ode to kaiju appeared. Later, there was a different cassette, called Songs of America. It was a compendium of radio-friendly hits like “Barracuda”, “Rocky Mountain Way”, and, naturally, “Burnin’ for You”. Teen Matt wore it out on the cassette deck of his first car. And, of course, there’s the video for “Shooting Shark“, which is as inexplicable as it is indelible, and Adult Matt doesn’t intend to suffer alone.
I should take a moment to note that this isn’t a bad song by any stretch. I tend to prefer BÖC’s later, poppier stuff to their earlier proto-metal output, and this is a pretty good example of that. The song also has a bizarre musical pedigree, with lyrics by Patti Smith and fucking Randy Jackson on bass. If you told me they got the actual Sexy Sax Man from Lost Boys for the brass solo I’d probably believe you. Smith’s lyrics tell a fairly straightforward story of an emotionally-exhausting relationship that has survived a number of attempted break-ups. The video spices up that narrative with sexy cave priestesses, ghostly neo-noir sequences and animal transformations.
For example, the first image we see is a sexy plague doctor riding a unicorn, and then things get confusing.
Here’s the first of our three primary settings, a bar/hotel on the wrong side of town. You can tell we’re on the other side of the tracks because it looks like a Paula Abdul video broke out on the set of The Untouchables.
Here, we meet our star-crossed lovers. The woman is in the bar, enduring awkward flirtation on the part of your dad’s high school friends.
Meanwhile, our protagonist is upstairs, gently trashing his hotel room. He is played by Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, lead guitar and vocalist for many of Blue Öyster Cult’s hits. Buck’s attempt here to portray — what I assume is supposed to be — a tortured romantic lead doesn’t exactly pan out. His acting amounts to Joey Tribbiani fart-smelling faces. He’s wearing a Danny Elfman-style slacks-and-wifebeater ensemble, and completely failing to pull it off. He’s got enough oil in his hair to kill a harbor full of penguins, and he’s about 36″ inches tall. Brother looks like Charlie Kelly’s uncle with the hands.
The narrative is about to sail off a cliff and crash into a jagged rock face of crazy, so let’s take this scene slowly. First, he retrieves a pistol, setting it down beside a glossy 8×10″ of the lady downstairs. Sure!
He then finds a Pulp Fiction-style glowing compartment in his dresser, but we actually get to see what’s inside of it.
It’s not Ving Rhames’ soul or whatever, it’s a shitty terrarium! Surprise!
This causes him to remember/hallucinate/astrally project to a meeting with an ancient shaman, who drops his snake in the fire. This summons sexy cave ladies with animal masks, who gyrate all around and force Buck to make faces like he’s smelling farts. But, like, even more farts than usual.
Back in the bar, we see that the band is the real Blue Öyster Cult, fronted by a Buck Dharma not dressed up for school picture day. Blue Öyster Cult is also made up of your dad’s friends from high school.
The shaman’s ritual proving unhelpful, Buck opens fire on a lamp, then hallucinates/sees the ghost/memory of his love on his bed. He limpwristedly hurls his pistol through the window in disgust, triggering another change of venue.
Now he’s in a forest, chasing the lady on foot like some kind of comparatively hairless Lon Chaney Jr. He catches her, but wouldn’t you know it, she’s actually a goat.
Golly, if I had a nickel. As this is happening, the lady leaves the bar in seeming disappointment. Apparently she expected a higher class of suitor at the diviest bar on the planet. Then, she sees Buck’s handgun, nestled in a bed of broken glass in a gutter, and this somehow causes things to take a turn for the better.
Buck sees/hallucinates a cartoon comet, which we can infer is a “Shooting Shark” because we then dissolve to a taxidermied fish surrounded by candles.
Back in the bar setting, the pistol vanishes. This delights a nearby vagrant who’s either secretly the shaman or part of a Wizard of Oz, “and YOU were there!” fantasy casting. We can also see the name of the bar: THE SHOOTING SHARK. Wow! Can you feel those goosebumps?
Finally, our unnamed lady returns to Buck’s room, standing in the doorway, perhaps reconsidering her decision to reconcile after seeing all the bullet holes that line the walls. For his part, Buck’s thrilled as well, and only looks like he smells about 16 farts:
And that’s the end of the story. I think it’s pretty useless to try and decipher the video’s symbolism. Not because it’s too complex, but because it’s not actually there. It’s meant to appear deeply symbolic, but that’s it; it’s confusing not for its depth but its shallowness. Before we judge it too harshly, though, let’s try to be good pop archaeologists, and attempt to understand “Shooting Shark” in a wider context.
This video is from 1983, the dawn of the MTV era. At this point in history, it was more important that there was a video than what was going on within it. We can write off a healthy fraction of the bizarreness as joyous play within a brand new sandbox, but let’s not be too forgiving. I think we can agree that this video is trying very hard to be cryptic, but I’m not altogether sure that it has a coherent narrative beneath the symbolism. That may make it guilty of a kind of Sartrean bad faith — more concerned with appearing deep and symbolic than actually being so — but it also makes it hysterical.
Blue Öyster Cult has always made music by and for dorky dads, which might be why this self-consciously artsy style suits them ill. If Blue Öyster Cult had their druthers, they’d be trying to emulate Frank Frazetta paintings and not David Lynch dream sequences. At least they didn’t literally end the video by unironically releasing a dove.
God damn it.
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