Music Of The Weak: Show Us Your Tits?

Let’s take a look at some videos of the musical variety.

Animal Collective – “My Girls”

After all the hoity toity jam-band accusations thrown their way, it stands to reason that Animal Collective would release the music video equivalent to a lava lamp.  Silhouettes of Panda Bear, Avey Tare and Geologist stand in front of their instruments, bobbing up and down like Planet of the Apes characters at a Busta Rhymes concert, as trippy animated amoebas rush all around them.  Minor disappointments occur—first, when the turtleneck one dude is wearing makes it look like he has an inhumanly gigantic Adam’s apple; later, when a snare drum appears next to the keyboardist—since he holds a drumstick through the entire video, the expectation is that he’s going to play the keyboard with that drumstick, which would have been awesome.   A video like this can only end in one place: Space!  After a brief excursion to a starlicious outer galaxy, Animal Collective turns green and starts melting.   Somewhere, a blogger is crying.

B.O.B. – “Lonely People”

The video for B.o.B.’s “Lonely People” opens with two girls flashing their tits on the dance floor while B.o.B. turns to dispassionately look at them in the foreground.  He then spends the next three minutes jumping in and out of club scenes and bar scenes like he’s that guy from the viral video who dances around the world—except that this is total fiction.  After seeing the title, you probably don’t need to be told that “Lonely People” is a rap version of “Eleanor Rigby.”  B.o.B. replaces Eleanor and Father Mackenzie with Cindy Lorenski (rhymes with “did meet” and “friendly)—who gets picked on in elementary school, so she starts clubbing, ends up pregnant, and ultimately shoots the dude while her kid cries in the street—and Kenny Levenski, a broke orphan who has a daughter named Izzy.  The intended underlying message of the video is that each person that seems to be having so much fun drinking, fighting, and dancing in the clubs is actually deeply lonely.  Those goth girls in the three way make-out session?  Lonely.  Dude clocking another guy over the head with a beer bottle from behind?  Lonely.   The girl who removes her top while dancing against a pole?  Totally lonely.  And the other girl who runs up and grabs her breasts is lonely too.  B.o.B. spends the video watching and shaking his head at them. If he weren’t rapping, he would probably be clicking his tongue like my ninety year old grandmother.  Of course, he can afford to look down on it all because “Lonely People” isn’t just a Public Service Announcement—it’s also a public service.  By broadcasting all of the ass-shaking and booby rubbing and body shots and so forth, B.o.B. is ensuring that each of these lonely, lonely people now have friends around the world.  He’s also doing the same thing for club debauchery that the movie Rush does for heroin—condemning it while making it look mysteriously alluring.  The actual underlying message seems to be that if you go out clubbing, you’re going to see a whole lot of fights and a whole lot of titty—and who doesn’t want that?  But check this out: After all the drunk chicks and tough guys leave the club, it’s just a small, dusty room.

Antony & the Johnsons – “Epilepsy is Dancing”

Having epilepsy is a little like being Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.  Except, instead of waking up naked in a goop-filled pod, attached to all kinds of heavy machinery, an epileptic travels to a world not unlike the orgy scene from Eyes Wide Shut and frolics with half-naked dudes and chicks while the abnormally large head of a transgender spits animated flowers at you.  With their “Epilepsy is Dancing” video, the Wachowski brothers and Antony do for seizures what B.o.B. did for messy clubbin’.  Couldn’t they just have used Speed Racer B-Roll?

Pistol Youth – “In My Eyes”

As if Golden Girls reruns weren’t nightmare-inducing enough on their own.

Metronomy – “A Thing For Me”

The video for “A Thing For Me” most likely would have still been awesome had Metronomy merely turned the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” sing-along films into a horror ride where no one can escape death from above, the British band do so much more.  “A Thing For Me” begins with the threesome rocking Hawaiian T-shirts in front of a green screen cycling through images of the ocean, a sunset, and a tropical aquarium.  The camera zooms out to reveal two women watching the group on television.  A couple seconds pass before each of the women is waylaid upside the head with a white bouncing ball.   The next three minutes are variations on that theme—people representing words to sing along with getting a big white ball bounced off their heads.  Once you get the storyline down, half the fun of repeat viewing is in watching people anticipate getting knocked upside the head.  Or not.  Either way, you get to see a bunch of people popped in the head.  In that respect, “A Thing For Me” works on a couple of levels.   Of course, it’s a high concept video which expands on its theme for three and a half minutes.  It also hits all the same pleasure centers as, say, America’s Funniest Home Videos—except that the idea is so good that watching the mild violence still makes you feel smart.  Metronomy has built a nice little stable of low-budget music videos with compelling concepts.   This one’s going to be hard to top.

-Martin Brown, 2009

Comments

[david brothers]

What's funny about the Lonely People video is that almost every time B.o.B. mentions lonely people, he looks and points directly at the viewer. Intentional? I do not know.

[Squidhelmet]

Thanks for recommending this Animal Collective song - I'm really diggin it!

That Pistol Youth video is goin around like wildfire right now! I've gotta find out what that face-replacement technique is called. That seems to be goin around too right now :)

[andre]

i dont want to seem like i care about material things...like my social status. I just want four walls of adobe slabs for my girls.

-panda bear