One of the great pop culture artifacts surrounding A Nightmare on Elm Street is a very early track from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, called “A Nightmare on My Street”. Yes, the very same Fresh Prince then went on to international superstardom only a few years later. This ode to slasher icon Freddy Krueger was a love letter to all of the Nightmare films, which at the time this came out were at their peak popularity. Especially with teenagers.
Although a proper version of the music video was thought destroyed for decades, thanks to Bloody-Disgusting we’ve learned that Will Smith’s former musical partner DJ Jazzy Jeff recently uploaded a proper version of the video to YouTube. Finally, all the Freddy faithful can now watch a decent version of it for the first time in years. Although Freddy couldn’t appear in the video for obvious reasons, it’s still a fun throwback to time when copyright infringement didn’t seem to be much of a concern for young musicians. (see, also: Robocop.) Also, the Freddy stand-in monster is a hoot and half.
Released shortly before A Nightmare on Elm St. 4: The Dream Master hit theaters at the height of “Freddy Mania,” the song was a big hit and went to #15 on the Billboard Hot 100. If you were around during the summer of 1988, you couldn’t get away from it if you listened to Top 40 radio. But the song sampled the original A Nightmare on Elm Street theme by Charles Bernstein without permission, and this apparently didn’t sit well with New Line Cinema. This resulted in the video essentially never seeing the light of day for decades, except for a very fuzzy VHS dub that would end up on YouTube. But thankfully, this has now been corrected, and fans can enjoy this campy trip down memory lane.
Images: New Line Cinema