Poison - Your Mama Don't Dance

What this video is

Released in February 1989, 'Your Mama Don't Dance' was Poison's cover of the 1972 Loggins & Messina rock classic, retooled as a glam metal anthem at the commercial apex of the genre. The video arrived just as hair metal dominated MTV and Top 40 radio — Poison's parent album 'Open Up and Say...Ahh!' had reached #2 on the Billboard 200 and would earn 5x platinum certification. The song charted at #10 on the Billboard…

Why it matters

A key artifact of the glam metal MTV era, this video exemplifies the genre's performance-spectacle formula at its commercial height. As a cover of a 1972 rock standard, it also documents the hair metal genre's active dialogue with its classic rock predecessors — repurposing boomer-era rebellion…

The director

Martin Henry Callner (August 25, 1946 – March 17, 2025) was an American director born in Chicago and raised in Cincinnati. He began his career in television news at WCPO-TV in 1969, later moving into HBO comedy specials and then music videos. He directed…