Love in the 21st Century (1992)
Lyrics :: Screen Captures
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"Plot" Summary: This is one freaky video. It's shot to be futuristic (at the time, the 21st century was still a decade away!) Because the song is about the depersonalization of romance in the modern age or, as Glenn puts it, "loneliness as an industry," the video is very dark. Using lighting techniques that bleach out skin tone and provide high contrast in colors, everything looks like it came out of a surreal comic book. The people don't look human, including Glenn. In fact, Glenn bleaches his hair for this video and with the lighting washing him out, he's almost unrecognizable! There is one aspect of the video that's pretty cool: Glenn plays different "characters" throughout. His main persona is futuristic-blonde-bleached-out guitar player. The others are, in order of appearance, a blonde Elvis impersonating lounge-singer, a businessman at a strip club, a Pee Wee Herman-esque dork, a blue collar guy, and finally some sort of priest.

The setting of the video is a futuristic form of a strip-joint that provides a lot of impersonal "love" to lonely guys. Not only does it have strippers, it has phone sex operators, girl-on-girl mud wrestling, peep shows, and "video dates." The video opens with one such lonely guy, a stereotypical dork with slicked-back hair and goober-type clothing, coming up to a booth to purchase entry into the place. There is a carnivalesque, chaotic atmosphere in and around it. In fact, the exterior looks a little like a circus tent (this is where "Freaky Guitarist Glenn" does his performing). Expressionless "exotic dancers" perform onstage (as does Elvis Glenn) in front of equally expressionless businessmen (one of which is Glenn) and male customers. Lights are flashing; glitter's everywhere. It's all very surreal. Our dorky guy isn't expressionless, though. His mouth is agape as he sees the beautiful, if impersonal, women dancing onstage.

We see cameras filming everything and a mysterious man watching all the screens in a room as he tabulates the profits for the night on an adding machine - judging by the length of the paper, it's been a lucrative evening.

The dork leaves the main room and goes off to a side room. Presumably, he is about to begin his "video date," as he is sitting in a room with a TV and surrounded by VHS tapes while holding flowers. There's not a pretty woman on the screen though - it's Glenn! The dork looks confused and incredulous. Then, the girls come up on the screen. Now the dork is wearing a big smile.

The next scene finds our dork in a dark room watching two bikini-clad women mud wrestle. "Working class Glenn" is sitting behind him, seemingly enjoying the show himself. Intercut with this are scenes of the dancers and more impersonal women, as well as Glenn playing and singing.

We then meet Glenn's next persona - a Pee Wee Herman type who likes phone sex. In another room, there is a line of women who all look alike answering the phones. They are bored and laughing at the men who call them even as they pretend to be "turned on" and give their rehearsed speech: "Hi, my name is Kitty..."

The scene cuts back to the dork, who is now entering a booth in order to make a "special" phone call himself. Again, intercut are the dancers and Glenn, until we finally get to the climax of the video. The dork has apparently found himself a girl in this crazy scenario. She's wearing a red dress and veil and they march up the aisle to get married by... Glenn the Futuristic Priest!

Like I said, one freaky video.

 

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