Dio - "Rock 'n' Roll Children" (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHMZPIeWfEw

Dio – “Rock ‘n’ Roll Children” (video)

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The mention of Dio’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Children” in yesterday’s Sinister Realm interview led me to see if that song had a video. (For catching cultural Hail Marys, YouTube is unrivaled.) Sure enough, it did. For four and a half minutes, I was lost in the ’80s, when music videos made on five-digit budgets aired on MTV only once. I must not have sneaked out of bed to catch this video the night it was aired; I’ll take this second chance to wear my metal pajamas.

The video is very much of its time. The styling, the wardrobe, the sets – it’s hard to describe to someone unfamiliar with the ’80s, but this film set, from the props to the Expressionist-yet-soft lighting, is THE ’80s film set. Any number of movies come to mind: The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, The Goonies, Gremlins. Children are prominent characters in these films, but they encounter adult situations. This video does likewise.

Thematically, it fits the ’80s narrative of losing innocence (see, e.g., movies set in high school, Bryan Adam’s “Summer of ’69”, Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” placed squarely at the end of the ’80s). It’s not a straight read of the lyrics, which say that the two kids in question are “paper and fire, angel and liar, the devil of one another”. In the produced-for-mass-consumption video, they’re just teenage lovers. This works, since the video adds another element, that of the big, bad “real world”. (The trope of “rock ‘n’ roll vs. the squares” is a timeless one.)

So the video isn’t innovative, and the music is standard ’80s pop metal. But the combination of the two is powerful. Admittedly, it may only appeal to people who grew up then. Kids now encounter music under far different conditions. It’s not scarce, it’s often visually bereft (contrast MP3s with full-on ’80s presentations of vinyl and videos), and as fans increasingly segregate themselves into subgenres, music is often a destination, not a doorway. These aren’t necessarily bad things, but the sensibility might not be there now to appreciate what might seem like pure cheese.

Musically, this song might be cheesy (the keyboards, geez). But its expression as a video is serious and fulfilling for me. Dio repeating “Rock ‘n’ roll children” like a mantra – 11 times, I think – each time appending a descriptor: “alone again”, “without a friend”, “children of the night”. By jove, Dio was talking about me. I truly was a rock ‘n’ roll child. It was what I lived for when I came home from school, what I stuffed in my ears for hours each night. Like the video, my rock ‘n’ roll obsession got me in trouble with authority figures. It wasn’t a smart obsession, and I’m still recovering from it decades later. But it was who I was.

Dio recognized rock ‘n’ roll’s power to define identities. Out of 15 songs on his 2005 live album Evil or Divine, three were about rock – and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Children” wasn’t on the set list. He did not differentiate between metal and rock. Since he predated metal, likely he saw it as existing on rock’s continuum. At the end of the day, such terminology is academic. Does the sound reach you? Do the images stay with you? Are you a different (and hopefully better) person afterwards? For me with this video: yes, yes, and yes.

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