Rubber Rodeo - Souvenir

JUL 01 1986 · 12:00

Rubber Rodeo - Souvenir (1986) Era: Mid-80s New Wave Country Crossover (1986) - Peak MTV era single from Rubber Rodeo's sophomore album Heartbreak Highway; released at the twilight of the band's commercial run on Mercury/PolyGram Records A culturally significant artifact documenting the brief commercial apex of one of the 1980s' most distinctive genre-fusion acts. The video's warm, theatrically staged aesthetic and fast editing pace are exemplary of mid-decade MTV production norms, while the band's unique cowboy-new-wave visual identity makes this a high-value specimen for studies of ironic retro-Americana in the alternative music canon. The commercial failure of Heartbreak Highway effectively ended Rubber Rodeo's major-label run, lending this video additional historical weight as a document of a pivotal, and final, creative moment. Context: Released in 1986 as the lead single from Heartbreak Highway, 'Souvenir' arrived at a moment when Rubber Rodeo's genre-blending proposition, fusing Roxy Music-influenced new wave electronics with sincere country-western aesthetics, had received significant MTV exposure but was struggling to convert that visibility into commercial chart success. The band, formed at the Rhode Island School of Design, embodied the art-school irony that defined much of early-MTV alternative culture: deploying 1950s cowboy kitsch as a postmodern aesthetic choice rather than a nostalgic one. Their fusion pre-figured the alt-country movement by nearly a decade, and the warm, theatrically staged production of this video reflects the era's MTV house style: narrative-performance hybrids with deliberate costuming as cultural signifier. Director notes: The IMDb title record tt25403162 confirms the video's existence and its 1986 release date but lists no director. The single 'Souvenir' was released from the album Heartbreak Highway (Mercury/PolyGram, 1986), produced by Ken Scott. No production company, director, or crew credits for this specific video have been located in any indexed public source as of the annotation date.