Video killed the Radio Star

The twin evils of business and lethargy have prevented me from either running or blogging much of late but a recent decision to join a fancy-pants gym in Kensington Olympia has reminded me that I like running to loud music.
I tell you what though, the little ipod stick has been pretty much thrown to one side because if there’s one thing this gym does well, its music. Not just music but music with those moving pictures that all the kids are talking about. The fancypants gym has a telly on every treadmill, AND on every cycle and on each of those tortuous skiing/stepping monstrosities too. They also have several dedicated ‘music-to-sweat-to’ channels. Sadly I seem to waver mainly between the Rock Anthem channel and the Back to the 80s channel. I worry that my gym mentor who seems a bit cool might look over my should and see me giving it to ACDC (To be honest I would be surprised if anyone felt the need to come within a 5 yard exclusion zone of me actually the amount of heat I’m probably giving off)
Anyway the point is this. If its motivation you’re after, get a gym employee to pick the music videos. They have little care for the quality of the music and prefer instead to choose material based on some simple, adrenalin focussed factors:
1) Inclusion of people wearing leotards/ boxing pads in video
2) Number of hot looking naked people on beach/ atop motor vehicles personifying your every body-phobic fear
3) Strong moral content – by which I mean gym morals i.e. if you are fat you are therefore unattractive so you should get down and give me 20 until you are not fat and become sexy and happy.

A very good example of a video which obeys all three of these laws is that of a 1990 Adam Ant release "Rough Stuff" In this video Adam enters in a strange cow print wide shouldered suit, out of shape yet inexplicably 'in the jungle'. He is taken in hand by some hot chicks clad in either girdles and uniform or boxing pads, and eventually, having knuckled down to some comedy shadow boxing, he ends up doing press ups on the lady herself. Phnarr. Dreadful song but the video was worth the visit to the gym alone. And I may share my fondness and admiration for Mr Ant's early adoption of Happy House with the germans alone but there it is.
Similarly un-credible yet bouncy gym based fun can be found in Mickey! by Toni Basil. And she is pleasingly robust looking. Crikey ! I thought. Roll back a couple of years and shave a few pounds off and I could be the star of a seminal novelty classic in a cheerleader outfit and everything. And somehow halfway down a painful 'Fat Burner' regime that was genuinely inspiring.
Today of course we are familiar with a whole genre of music seemingly invented for gyms and perverts watching The Box late at night in the form of everything ever released by Eric Prydz and so forth. But lo! I found a so-so disco remix of a classic (Last Night a DJ Saved my Life) with a cracking comedy Tranny Vogue contest in it. Its not big, and its certainly not clever but when big clever birds find themselves pounding the rubber in a world where neither qualities are nearly as valued as small and stupid then it suddenly looks like the Very Thing. Honestly.
Clawing back some credibility for one second, then obviously the bendy girl action in I like the way you move is rocking in the extreme and is broadly the only reason I ever go to the gym, i.e. to imagine I was one of them bendy girls at rock concerts worthy of being on stage, and also to go a bit mental when he goes 'I like the way you MOVE'