Magical Tours

By JAY COCKS

Onward, ever onward. The music business means to turn VCR fanatics, who spent $7.5 billion buying and renting tapes in 1987, into music freaks. Two major artists from Columbia Records (owned, of course, by Sony) have become point men in this brand-new marketing assault: Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, who are both releasing new, ambitious feature-length video albums.

Jackson's hot-selling Moonwalker is an eight-segment 94-min. tour through . the Glove's wide-ranging but uneasy imagination. Besides a lively montage of Jackson's career ("a retrospective of 24 years of hits"), Moonwalker includes some nifty clay and cutout animation, as well as a "centerpiece" spun out around Michael's superbly spooky song Smooth Criminal. Jackson becomes, literally, what so many people have already accused him of being: a special effect. All of Moonwalker is heavily shrouded in fantasy -- of persecution, of reprisal, of reclaiming lost innocence -- but compromised by its own willful and slightly desperate flash.

The Boss's Video Anthology/1978-88 is due in stores Jan. 31. Springsteen's video is, in contrast to Jackson's, refreshingly modest and small-scale, as if he shook out the video scrapbook and passed along some souvenirs. Although approximately a third of the 100-min. tape is taken up with material from the 1987 Tunnel of Love album and tour, most of the gems date back a bit further. An early video of Rosalita, made a decade ago, has a real scruffy, low-tech charm. Springsteen quickly learned not only how to play to the camera but how to work with it as well, and you can see the moment it happened, in Brian De Palma's crafty 1984 rendering of an in-concert Dancing in the Dark. After that, Springsteen performed dazzlingly and acted well (most notably in John Sayles' splendid narrative worked around I'm on Fire). He may not be ready to hit the road to Hollywood, but these videos prove that between rock and music, Springsteen's on a two-way street.