The Uncensored Andy Warhol-Directed Video for The Cars’ Hit “Hello Again” (NSFW)

Andy Warhol was many things to many people in his long and eventful career: painter and provocateur, promoter and director. But it surprised me to learn that he also made music videos. Well, he made one music video, for The Cars single “Hello Again” from their 1984 album Heartbeat City. The biggest hit from that album, “You Might Think,” was a massive MTV video hit and one of the first music videos to use computer graphics. Warhol plays on much of the aesthetic of the “You Might Think” video, which kind of epitomized the cheesy, slightly sexist, mid-eighties look The Cars made big: giant, scantily-clad women, rudimentary computer graphics scenes featuring sunglasses and cocktails, and, of course, plenty of cars. But there’s also lots of signature Warhol here: lots of parties, lots of bodies, lots of sex (and nudity).

Pop music always played a significant role in Warhol’s work, so it seems only natural that he would align himself with the cutting-edge mid-eighties synthpop of the Cars. What’s more, he appears in a cameo as a bartender in the video, which also features a very young Gina Gershon. For obvious reasons, the extended, uncensored version of Warhol’s video (watch it here) didn’t make the rounds on MTV. The censored version is, you might say, just a little less sexy, and a lot less Warhol. Since Warhol died in 1987, this video represents one of the last pieces of the artist’s work. Warhol, an early adopter of digital graphics technology, had previously used Amiga computers to animate images of Marilyn Monroe and create computer art of his friend Debbie Harry. See him “paint” the “first computer artwork,” a portrait of Harry, on an Amiga computer below.

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Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.