VIDEO VAULT THURSDAY!
(because exclamation points make all the difference)

Whenever I think back to the 90’s, I think about all the great music that was created around that time. Over the course of my lifetime, the 60’s are well remembered even if I was a kid at the time, the 70’s were the era where I came of age but the 80’s were like a desert for the most part where music was concerned. Sure there was the occasional oasis, a bright spot of an album, band or song that I liked but for the most part it was a long, arid decade.

Right at the end of the decade though, grunge started to come to prominence and a flood of wonderful new music seemed to issue forth from all corners of the globe.

This week’s video is from 1992 and to me is emblematic of the period.


The video dovetails into the mood of the song and does a good job of speaking to the issue of alienation.

The video, directed by Samuel Bayer, stars Heather DeLoach as the “Bee Girl” — a young tap dancer wearing a homemade bee costume and large glasses, modeled after the Blind Melon album’s cover: a family picture of Georgia Graham, younger sister of drummer Glen Graham. The Bee Girl’s story is interspersed with footage of Blind Melon performing in a field against a clear blue sky.
It opens on the girl’s tap routine; the audience responds with laughter, and the girl runs off stage in tears. As the song plays, she wanders through a city, stopping to perform her dance for whoever will watch. Ultimately — at the point in the song where the word “escape” is repeated — she peeks through a gate, astonished, then runs through it to join a group of “bee people” of all shapes and sizes dancing joyfully in a green field.
As a result of the video, DeLoach appeared on the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, and reprised her Bee Girl dance (in full costume) in the video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s song “Bedrock Anthem.”
VH1 ranked the “No Rain” video 83nd on its “100 Greatest Videos of All Time” list; the song was also No. 99 on the channel’s “100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders” list.