With the Los Angeles Rams now back in the Super Bowl, for the second time in four seasons, it’s the perfect time to revisit their 1986 music video “Let’s Ram It,” which didn’t exactly specialize in the art of subtlety.(editor’s note: we had an exclusive with the best and most notable player on the L.A. Rams side of “Ram It,” Eric Dickerson, read that in series here)
Remember, when the L.A. Rams recorded this monstrosity of a song, it was a very different time and completely different political climate. When the Rams moved back to L.A. a few years ago, the internet’s virtual time capsule was dug up and “Let’s Ram it” was re-explored.
We’re going to try and keep this post as apolitical, and devoid of serious social issues as possible, and just only say this- there is no way in hell they would ever even remotely consider making something like this today, and for many reasons that go way above and beyond the scope of this post.
And that’s a good thing.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, paraphrasing Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
We invite you to watch the 1986 L.A. Rams crime against song and dance above, and then form your own judgements and opinions of the work before reading on. If you can make it through all five and half minutes, then congratulations, you have a lot of moxie and will.
It’s a bummer that the one 1980s L.A. Rams player every football fan has heard of, Dickerson, doesn’t show up until around the 3:55 mark. He has a great message: “when it comes to ladies, I want a brainy one.”
Yes, smart is the new sexy, and this is a song about sex, sex and more sex.
You already knew that, but if you want more detail on that narrative, you can read the New York Daily News’ take on it from January 2016, or the Vice Sports article that came out a month after that.
If you want to know why this attempt at making music transpired in the first place, well Yahoo’s NFL blog, Shutdown Corner caught up to the guys who did it and you can read all about their motives and ambitions with this thing at this link.
Snce everyone else who has written about this music video has already covered that the 1986 L.A. Rams were signing about sex, ad nauseam, let’s move on to what else is going on here in this clip.
It’s amazing how way off the timing of the lip syncing is here. Yes, real musicians lip sync their videos all the time, but it’s actually “synced.”
Ram It also brings us back to the old Anaheim Stadium, the Big A, which makes us remember the halcyon days when football and baseball teams often shared stadiums.
In those salad days, there much was much less defrauding of taxpayers, seizing public funding and then utilizing it as corporate welfare handouts to billionaires, just so they could build their privately owned cathedrals.
(Okay, so we lied, a bit, as we did get somewhat political here)
In those days, it wasn’t pre-ordained that every single pro sports team got their own venue. Another thing that jumps out in the clip is just how conservative the L.A. Rams cheerleader costumes are, at least when compared to today’s outfits.
At the end of the day, Ram It didn’t work on a level beyond the base and superficial. By design, it was a knockoff of the Super Bowl Shuffle, because that’s just what NFL teams did back then. A lot of teams, and I mean A LOT, recorded a rap “song” in the ’80s.
There just wasn’t much more to it. Now let’s see what the L.A. Rams can do in their fifth attempt at winning a Super Bowl. It won’t be an upset, as they’re favored -4.5 on Super Bowl Sunday.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Bank (TheSportsBank.Net) and author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” as well as “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune, and co-hosts the After Extra Time podcast. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
Leave a Reply