Billy Joel - Tell Her About It

What this video is

Released in 1983 as the lead single from An Innocent Man, 'Tell Her About It' was Billy Joel's loving homage to the Motown and early soul sounds of his adolescence. The album was explicitly conceived as a tribute to American popular music of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including doo-wop and soul. The video amplifies this nostalgia by staging a full period-accurate Ed Sullivan Show parody, referencing one of the…

Why it matters

A defining artifact of the early-MTV pop era and the 1983 retro-soul revival, this video codified the 'high-concept period parody' subgenre of music videos. Its Ed Sullivan Show framing directly influenced subsequent nostalgia-format videos and demonstrated that a comedy-inflected, theatrically…

The director

Jay Dubin is a Brooklyn-born director who transitioned from a background in physics and engineering into music video direction in the early 1980s. His career was launched after filming footage for John Lennon's Double Fantasy sessions in 1980. He became a…