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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss

Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Clas­sic Meet­ing of Egos

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.