As one of the many “bohunks” (an offensive term John Hughes was fond of) from the 1980s, Nick Kamen will forever live on in the hearts of women as being among the first men willing to be so flagrantly objectified in mainstream advertising. All for the sake of a Levi’s commercial in a laundromat. But, thanks to Madonna, he would go on to shine for the audience he was truly meant to cater to: men.
Not that he couldn’t do that in the Levi’s commercial, but with the Jean-Baptiste Mondino-directed video for one of his only hit singles, “Each Time You Break My Heart,” Kamen was given the ultimate “queering”–whether intentional or not. And it was undeniably because Madonna’s influence on the production was already clear in terms of Mondino serving additionally as the director for her “Open Your Heart” video, which also came out at the end of 1986 as well.
The cheeseball lyrics of, “Each time you break my heart I try to put my pride aside/Each time you break my heart/A little voice inside me cries” would have fit right in on Madonna’s True Blue album, which is precisely what it was intended for until M and her producer/co-songwriter, Stephen Bray, decided to throw this new Sire Records ingenue a bone. For it seemed Madonna was always happiest when taking on multiple projects, even mentoring.
From Madonna’s lips, it would have sounded like a woman being done wrong by her cheating man, but with Kamen at the helm, it just comes across like he’s trying to suppress “his” “good-time girl’s” “antics.” So it is that he bemoans, “I know how it feels to be the talk of the town/I’m not gonna let you go and run around/I need to know that you’ll be true to me/‘Cause that’s the way it’s got to be.” Bish, who you think you is tryna control somebody? Madonna?
While “Each Time You Break My Heart” might harbor that 50s-era pastiche Madonna was fond of using on True Blue (as well as the same pastiche that appeared in Kamen’s illustrious Levi’s commercial), there is nothing “chaste” about the seedy aesthetic Mondino provides for the visual of Kamen as “nightclub” singer in the vague style of campiness that Isabella Rossellini provides in Blue Velvet.
A swinging lamp above a man slumped over at a table as a young boy (Felix Howard, the very same from the “Open Your Heart” video) holds him adds an immediately Lynchian feel—or at least a Bronski Beat one, pederasty or not. “Come on boys, wake up,” Kamen says sensually into the microphone, as the other “single men” we’re supposed to believe were done wrong by women awaken after a long night at the club. Some of them appear to be employees (like the piano player), while others are complete randos. Like the man with “LOVE” tattooed on his fingers as he peeps at Kamen through his hands like Felix Howard does at Madonna in the peep show of “Open Your Heart.” It’s all very homoerotic. Even in spite of the introduction of a woman projected on the screen (who doesn’t look unlike an early era Queen of Pop) meant to be the one Kamen is pining over. Yet that seems more like a tossed in “plot point” to prove, at the last minute, that these men aren’t gathered here for some kind of orgiastic delight.
But that’s not what it looks like when another man rolls over on the pool table he’s been sleeping on, still “spent” from whatever happened last night. More random insertions (no pun intended) of this woman’s photos still don’t mitigate the moment when a different hungover man ogles Kamen’s gyrating, Elvis-esque body through a glass, as though he can’t understand how no one has jumped this rockabilly dreamboat yet while he sings them all a siren song.
Another non sequitur flourish occurs when yet another man (they just keep appearing) slides down a pole in a manner that can only be seen as… evocative. He then dances next to it as one more bloke on the second floor writhes against his own pole. Yes, very phallic indeed. And, as Madonna would later say in Truth or Dare, “Why don’t you take a poll… and shove it up your ass?”
Like the fin of “Open Your Heart,” this video, too, concludes with Kamen on the street. “Come on boys, wake up,” he urges again at the end, while walking down the road in the light of dawn. A milieu that will force him to play it much straighter than he has been the past several hours. Or not, whatever. Bisexuality also works.
