999,806: Billy Squier — Rock Me Tonite

Well enough has already been written about how bad the video is for this song, how five minutes sashaying around a bedroom in a pink tank top (pink! a color never ever worn by rock musicians in the 1980's!) destroyed Squier's high-flying career in an instant. Plenty of pixels already display numerous denunciations of "Rock Me Tonite" all over the internet, mocking Squier's prancing, finger-popping, bed-rolling, waist-bending, marching, pointing, leg-kicking performance in what is a canonical entry in the so-bad-it's-good category of pop entertainment. Other than its ridiculousness, what persists is the disbelief it arouses. How could Billy Squier, a hook-writing rocker—the poor man's Robert Plant with a guitar—have made such a blatantly false move, a worse career choice than John Bonham's death binge? What was he thinking?

What was he thinking? It's a fair question. The man who helmed the video was Kenny Ortega, the choreographer who would later do Madonna's "Material Girl", "Dirty Dancing" and the "High School Musical" movies, and he does not seem an obvious choice for Squier, unless you figure Billy was sitting around watching "Xanadu" and said, "Get me the guy who did that", which film historians agree is basically an impossible thing for anyone to have said. More likely was that Squier wanted someone who knew how to make an interesting music video, since the ones Squier made for his "Don't Say No" album were all shot on what looks like a nondescript club stage without an audience. They were boring. From the vantage of the MTV landscape in 1984, they flat-out sucked.

Furthermore, it's not as though Squier's output was churning along at a consistently high level. His late-breaking career peaked with "Don't Say No", an album he cut at 31, after which his music regressed to the mean. He was still writing hits, but his records were padded with more and more filler. And of course music was changing. A Zeppelin-esque act like Squier's, a relic of 1970's stadium rock, was less and less relevant during a time when Van Halen was hard rock's leading edge, pushing toward a hair metal future.

In a situation where Squier was probably desperate to get noticed amid MTV's increasingly hip fare, on came Ortega. And "Rock Me Tonite" fits right into his oeuvre. Ortega was just doing exactly what you'd expect him to do: coreograph a music video. It wasn't his fault that Squier came packaged with what were quite possibly the gawkiest, most awkward repertoire of stage moves in rock history. In his natural element—that is to say, while playing a guitar—Squier does alright (here's "In the Dark"
for reference). But take away the axe, and Squier had no clue what to do with his lanky, angular body. As evidenced by the video for "The Stroke", Squier was prancing, pointing, and engaging in embarrassing leg kicks well before Ortega thought to put him in a bedroom equipped with a stripper pole. And about that pink shirt and the finger popping? Nobody seemed to have as much beef with it when 1982's "Everybody Wants You" debuted.

Ortega's crime (report to bad music video jail, Kenny Ortega) was that his directorial style took what were already Squier's least artful attributes and amplified them. Like a grotesque caricature, the Billy Squier in "Rock Me Tonite" did exactly what Billy Squier always did, only moreso. So go ahead and cite Ortega for Failure to Adapt in the Face of Certain Doom, but don't blame him for wrecking Squier's career. Rather, "Don't Say No" was the perfect explanation for why Squier was on the way out. Squier's musical schtick was stale, his moves were lame, he was damn near 35, he still had Brian May's 1977 haircut, and that shit was not going to fly in the mid-'80s. At least he and Ortega left us with a lasting artifact that's enjoyable for two different reasons. The first reason is obvious. The second reason is, don't look at it and listen: it's a sweet fucking song for Christ's sake. Makes me wish someone would write a review about it.