Let’s kick off New Zealand Music Month with this newly uploaded cultural taonga, thanks to NZ On Air – Supergroove’s very first music video from 1992. As the title suggests, the song is an introduction to the group and the video also acts as a simple primer for this young and energetic group.
The video starts with a sophisticated lady putting a Supergroove CD in her modern compact disc player. So intense is the CD, the player blows up. The lady doesn’t look too concerned.
The smoke clears and we meet the band wearing colourful ’90s clothes. This is how they dressed in their very early days, before their manager took them aside and gave them a bunch of styley monochrome threads. It’s crazy, colourful ’90s garb, and hilariously this sort of stuff is very slowly coming back into fashion. As is the monochrome. Another hallmark of the ’90s is the appearance of a full-screen graphics emphasising select words from the song. FUNK. BEAT. RETREAT. BURNED. HEAT.
The video alternates between this colourful footage of the band in a white studio and grainy footage of the band playing live. It’s like the two natural states of Supergroove – making cool music video and bringing the house down at a gig.
There are fewer of the video tricks that became the hallmark of later Supergroove videos. But there is some back and forth between Karl and Che, shot as black silhouettes against a white background. It’s reminiscent of a similar later bit in the “Can’t Get Enough” video, and – Generation X alert – it was surely inspired by the Electric Company’s silhouette word song.
It takes guts and/or naivety for a bunch of 18-year-olds to burst into the world of music and declare, “We bring the funk”. But Supergroove didn’t do a bad job of following through.
Next… heavenly creatures.