Listen, pal, I’m having a smartly soundtracked existential crisis here

While preparing this piece about Karin Dreijer Andersson of the Knife’s Fever Ray guise, I came across some interviews where Andersson cites Miami Vice as one of her primary influences for the project. I had what Oprah might call an “aha” moment. The perpetual tension, the melancholy, the sense of impending doom—the songs on the Fever Ray LP do create a feeling akin to Miami Vice’s music video-style sequences: those overly melodramatic moments where Sonny (and sometimes Tubbs) get to look cool while sulking over some mistake (usually someone they were trying to protect getting shot) to the sounds of an emotionally overwrought ’80s power ballad handpicked by music supervisor Jan Hammer. Among them are some of the coolest looking montage scenes ever committed to film, in my opinion.

After mentioning the Miami Vice thing in the aforementioned Fever Ray piece, it dawned on me that the show is now more than two decades old. (In fact, the first of Fever Ray’s NYC performances next week is on September 28, the 25th anniversary of Miami Vice’s first episode). The average reader may have never seen it to know there was more to it than bikinis and pastel-colored cotton suits. I figured I’d dig out some prime examples of what I’m talking about:

The godfather of them all: the infamous Phil Collins/”In The Air Tonight” scene from the pilot episode.

10 CC’s “Cry.” Sonny shoots Ted Nugent in some weird desert area, then sets up his girlfriend after he finds out she’s a pimp.

Sonny experiences conflict to the sounds of Red 7’s “Heartbeat” (not to be confused with Don Johnson’s own “Heartbeat,” released a year later in ‘86).

Simply Red’s “Picture Book”: tight bassline and some nice dub flourishes.

Sonny gains his memory back to the sounds of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.”

For the most part, the creepy videos spawned from the Fever Ray album share less with these Miami Vice scenes then the music. This one for “If I Had A Heart,” with its foreboding aquatic journey, does evoke one of Crockett’s moonlit existential crises, though: