Friday Night Videos, y’all!
(Or, “This is the way the week ends…”)
At their best, music videos aren’t just commercials; which is to say, like advertisements, they can be works of art in themselves. The fact that they can be only tenuously-linked to (or even entirely-divorced from) any pretense to narrative or context only increases the imagery’s dreamlike potential for unsettling and powerful free-association.
I can take or leave the song up top – it’s decent post-Shadow stuff, but it’s not all that memorable to me, though I appreciate its commitment to old-fashioned squall – but that video is something else, isn’t it? (NOTE: I recommend watching it, and the videos below, fullscreen/HD if possible).
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“Just look at that sky. It’s a work of art! Ha! Nature never knew colors like that…”
This is what you want; this is what you get.
Anybody seen the movie the footage below is taken from? Worthwhile? It makes a heck of a music video, that’s for sure.
(The song was also used in Miami Vice.)
(WARNING: SOME LANGUAGE AT THE START):
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“Mommy, can I go out and kill tonight?”
Slinky electropop (why is it always better when the singer sounds bored?) + Misfits nod + lovely (if slightly disturbing) surrealism from Fuco Ueda; what’s not to love?:
Sweet dreams, kiddies!
What!? A movie with Iggy Pop that I haven’t seen?
Looking at IMDB, it appears to also have Lemmy as a taxi driver. And that is Dylan McDermott.
I think Imma have to rent that.
I am kinda surprised that I didn’t see that back in the day, that was right up our alley… Lemmy, huh? I am with you on needing to see it, but have the feeling I will be telling my wife the whole time “yeah, I know, but it is still better than Dr Poo.”
That first video was both beautiful and discombobulating at the same time. “Why are these floating 3D archetypal symbols there? Why are they floating towards me?!”
Also, the dervishes reminded me of this, which I’ve always found strangely mesmerizing.
That picture is cool.
Those symbols seemed to me like breaking fourth wall – you know, that brand of horror that says to the viewer, “now that you’ve watched this video, its reality has bled into yours, and the curse is laid on YOU”.
They did a good job with the girl with the veil turning to the camera, but repeatedly cutting away right before she reveals her face; that’s definite nightmare imagery right there. I also liked the wide shot of the black-clad woman running towards the herd in the far distance, that was beautiful.
Like I said, I think the track is OK, but I do like that it is sort of noisy/abrasive/willing to sound unsettling.
That scene, with the woman running towards the distant herd, is definitely beautiful and haunting.
There’s something about snow that always seems to get you half way to both beautiful and haunting. Probably the uniformity.
Islamic fashion hath become the new face of horrible. An old YouTube of mine, Persian Calligraphy.
A warning to any who click on BP’s link: images of real-world violence contained therein (Blaise, the video is well-done).
BP, as you know we don’t do politics/religion here at MD, but I suppose I invited it by that Gaslamp Killer video, so into the breach.
Truth be told, I wondered if people would pick up the thread of wondering why “Islamic” garb, as worn in the top video, would be associated with horror; I wondered myself if there was some deeper meaning intended.
I see on wikipedia that Gaslamp Killer (an LA musician) is Jewish (of Turkish, Lebanese, Mexican and Lithuanian descent). He didn’t actually direct the Prague-shot video (that would be a production entity called Hyperballad) but he presumably had some creative control over it. I have no idea of his politics or religious beliefs.
RE: Chris’ thought above about why using snow in your video is a shortcut to “haunting”, I actually spent some time thinking about the colors used (primarily, blackest black highly-contrasted with whitest white) because I found even that “disturbing”.
There has been a bit written in recent years about the way our associations of black=evil, white=good appear to be cross-cultural and perhaps hard-wired all the way back to ancient fears of rot and contagion. My assumption is that this color scheme in the video is playing a bit with that (the girl in the veil does look “diseased”, though that “disease” may be vampirism or something).
I also assume that they could just as well have used priests and nuns in black garb for similar effect (it’s not like sinister priests and nuns have no place in horror iconography), but perhaps didn’t do so, so as to seem more up-to-date/cosmopolitan/different?
In short, I didn’t THINK the piece was some sort of intentional or inadvertent anti-Islamic piece (my guess is, it was mostly a lot of “wouldn’t this random ominous cryptic s**t look COOL?!”) or I wouldn’t have posted it.
But YMMV, and I can certainly see how it might be taken that way.