video

Eurythmics - Love Is A Stranger (link to YouTube)

It was 1982. I was a sophomore in high school, extremely shy and anti-social. There was this incredibly hot and hunky tall security guard with platinum hair, his name was James. We never actually met but every time I passed by him in the hall between classes his eyes locked onto me. Instinctively I knew why and yet nothing ever came of it. He was my sexual fantasy come to life, at the time in my life when I could barely even articulate what it meant, and I could never imagine where it would lead me.

One day I was watching MTV and this video came on. Through Annie Lennox I had finally felt the stirrings of my inner edge. I learned just recently that when this video was first presented to MTV and they screened it they demanded to see Miss Lennox's birth cetificate because they assumed she was a man and the video promoted transvestism and they would never air it.

Seeing it now, it holds up beautifully after all these years and retains its disturbing yet seductive erotic quality and, like a Helmut Newton photograph, leaves most contemporary music videos embarrassingly vanilla in its wake. Brilliant.