"Addicted To Love" Video Makes Indelible Mark On MTV

1986

Propelled by a memorable video where lookalike models vamp the song, Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love" hits #1 on the Hot 100.

Love was Robert Palmer's disease back in 1979 with "Bad Case of Loving You," but now it's turned into a full-blown addiction in "Addicted to Love," the second single from his Riptide album. The song was originally conceived as a duet with Chaka Kahn until her label, Warner Bros., refused to let her sing on the track, forcing Palmer to re-record the high notes himself. A few more guys round out the instrumentation, including Palmer's Power Station bandmate Andy Taylor, of Duran Duran, on guitar. But the song is not without female influence. In the music video, Palmer is backed by a "band" of lookalike models who are little more than fashionable accessories for the suave singer. Indeed, looks trumped musical ability when director Terence Donovan auditioned girls for the clip. "I was 21 and got the part on the strength of my modeling book," Mak Gilchrist, the "bassist," tells Q magazine. "We were meant to look and 'act' like showroom mannequins." The quartet does strike a dramatic image in their little black dresses. Donovan, a British fashion photographer known for capturing the mod fashion of the Swinging '60s, shifts his lens to the '80s. He completes the Palmer Girl look with slicked-back hair, rouged cheekbones, and red-glossed lips. The result is an iconic slice of '80s fashion that makes the "Addicted To Love" video unforgettable and proves the increasingly popular music video medium can have a powerful effect on a song's success, as the single rockets to #1. The clip wins Best Male Video at the MTV Video Music Awards, and Palmer takes home a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Not everyone is pleased with the trend of using women as props: Feminist critics accuse Palmer of sexism and sexploitation. "I was as much a prop as the girls," Palmer counters in an interview with The Guardian. He even brings back Donovan and a bevy of Palmer Girls for his "Simply Irresistible" video in 1988 to much acclaim. Many artists in years to come pay homage to both clips, with Paula Abdul enlisting little girls to emulate the Palmer Girls in her "Forever Your Girl" video, and Shania Twain doing a gender flip with a crew of male models in "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" Pepsi promotes their "simply irresistible" soft drink with a parody of the video in 1989 and again in 2002 with Britney Spears. The new millennium continues to push the envelope towards objectification in increasingly provocative videos casting women as sex objects, and spurs conversations about misogyny in music (see "Blurred Lines").