It is snowing lightly outside my window, because this is New England in a time of global warming and who knows how the weather works anymore.
Yesterday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asakiyume sent me the link for the music video of Miike Snow's "Genghis Khan" (dir. Ninian Doff, 2016), which I promptly watched about five times in a row. The song itself is catchy dance-pop; the video is delightful textual supervillain/spy slash. Not only has it developed a well-deserved fandom since January, the director is collecting the fanart. It has great dancing, but also great faces. I'll be stunned if no one requests it for Yuletide.
Evangelizing about "Genghis Khan" reminded me that the last time I made a real post about music videos was in 2013 (notes here). They're still not my primary form of engagement with popular music, but I have since managed to acquire some others I like. Have another totally skewed and incomplete list! I've mentioned some of these before, but I might as well have them all in the same place.
Arcade Fire, "Rebellion (Lies)" (2005). This song was the first I heard of Arcade Fire; it was the standout track on a mix a grad school friend made for me in 2005. I used to play it while writing all-night papers, which was almost certainly the wrong way to take the lyrics. I didn't see the video until quite recently. It's simple, but it works, and just as the viewer thinks they've figured out the metaphor, there's the ending.
Bastille, "Pompeii" (2013). It's your standard alien invasion, but it's done really well. The oil-black eyes are only a little more obvious than the smiling affectlessness of pod people.
Beyoncé, "Formation" (2016).rushthatspeaks showed me this video the night before the Super Bowl. The politics, the choreography, and the costuming are as powerful as everyone has been saying. It is also an earworm.
Concrete Blonde, "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" (1990). I still don't think I ever figured out who's playing the vampire, but he has the profile for it. I cannot tell if it's an intended effect that he reminds me of Sweeney Todd.
Daisy Chainsaw, "Hope Your Dreams Come True" (1992). It's a short film of Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love." It's very faithful. The Countess' cobwebbed bower is a great piece of silent-era set design. What else do you need to know?
The Dead Milkmen, "Punk Rock Girl" (1988). Why are there zombies? I presume they are some kind of metaphor for the deadening forces of suburban conformity, but I don't care. I love the band blowing the lip-synching and futzing around in the background of the video; I love the one glimpse we get of the punk rock girl herself. I can have this song stuck in my head for weeks on end.
Fiction, "The Apple (For Alan Turing)" (2014). The song is a biographical sketch of Alan Turing; the video sharpens the focus to his relationship with Arnold Murray and the fateful burglary in 1952, which Alan reported assuming—like a right-thinking person or a time traveler—that the police would be more interested in catching a burglar than prosecuting the complainant's sexuality. For all that, the video is not a downer.
FKA twigs, "Two Weeks" (2014). This one also came courtesy of Rush-That-Speaks. I think it's the closest we're ever going to get to a film of early Tanith Lee, especially The Birthgrave (1975) and The Storm Lord (1976). The camera pulls back with the deliberation of monumental things, where the only reason they make sense is distance.
Fountains of Wayne, "Stacy's Mom" (2003). On the one hand, like Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986), the video narrows the possibilities of the song in a way where I prefer the open-endedness of the original. On the other, the timing with which the lawnmower hits the mailbox is perfection. Your mileage.
Jack's Mannequin, "The Resolution" (2009). Unusually for me and music videos, I am basically indifferent to the song, but the storyline features the sea stalking the lead singer, so we're all set here.
Joy Division, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (1980). It turns out that my preferred version of this song is actually the earlier take from January 1980, known these days as the "Pennine Version," but the process of discovering this fact led to my watching the official music video for the first time last week. The filming is as DIY as it gets. They are all so astonishingly young.
The Killers, "Mr. Brightside" (2004). Look, I don't know if this video is actually any good. It can't count as the first music video I ever saw, because there was some unavoidable exposure in high school via my best friend who actually followed contemporary music, but it marks my adult engagement with the form. I ran into it late one night in New Haven and I am fairly certain it's a parody of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001), but mostly you should know that it contains someone angrily flipping a checkers board. I expect to be fond of it forever.
The Pack a.d., "Rocket" (2014) and "Animal" (2015). Maya Miller and Becky Black continue to make short genre films backed with terrifically thrashy garage rock. I really like them.
Shearwater, "Quiet Americans" (2016). I can think of many ways a video for this song could have gone, including science fiction, but the minimalist, political intimacy of this staging works seamlessly with the subterranean electronic sound. Again, the faces are great.
The Smiths, "The Queen Is Dead/There Is a Light That Never Goes Out/Panic" (1986). In hindsight it should really have occurred to me immediately that Derek Jarman would direct music videos for the Smiths. The blurred Super-8 sensuality of "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" reminds me a lot of The Angelic Conversation (1986).
The Spook School, "Binary" (2015). In which the band impersonate binary concepts of gender in silver-spray-painted cardboard robot costumes and then discard and destroy them. The sing-along at the end is fantastic.
Sun Seeker, "Georgia Dust" (2016). I'm not indifferent to the song, but I don't love it as much as the interpreting visuals. They give such good daylight horror. It's a witch song.
Taylor Swift, "Blank Space" (2014). It's like '60's-era Hitchcock with more cellphones and a vague sense of the Gothic supernatural. Rush-That-Speaks was reminded of Mélusine.
Vitas, "Opera #2" (2000). I actually saw this video for the first time about ten years ago, but it took me forever to track down due to an unaccountable failure to make any notes about a short musical film whose stranded siren protagonist sings at glass-shattering pitches, has gills, and lives alone with jars and jars of goldfish. I believe I havegreygirlbeast to thank for it.
White Lung, "Hungry" (2016). What I like most about this video—besides the song—is the way it would be a conventional cautionary tale about the self-devouring nature of fame except for the haunting, which is serial and contagious.
Disagreements? Favorites I've missed? Questions, comments, howls of outrage? Someday I will be rested enough for critical thought again.
Yesterday
asakiyume sent me the link for the music video of Miike Snow's "Genghis Khan" (dir. Ninian Doff, 2016), which I promptly watched about five times in a row. The song itself is catchy dance-pop; the video is delightful textual supervillain/spy slash. Not only has it developed a well-deserved fandom since January, the director is collecting the fanart. It has great dancing, but also great faces. I'll be stunned if no one requests it for Yuletide.Evangelizing about "Genghis Khan" reminded me that the last time I made a real post about music videos was in 2013 (notes here). They're still not my primary form of engagement with popular music, but I have since managed to acquire some others I like. Have another totally skewed and incomplete list! I've mentioned some of these before, but I might as well have them all in the same place.
Arcade Fire, "Rebellion (Lies)" (2005). This song was the first I heard of Arcade Fire; it was the standout track on a mix a grad school friend made for me in 2005. I used to play it while writing all-night papers, which was almost certainly the wrong way to take the lyrics. I didn't see the video until quite recently. It's simple, but it works, and just as the viewer thinks they've figured out the metaphor, there's the ending.
Bastille, "Pompeii" (2013). It's your standard alien invasion, but it's done really well. The oil-black eyes are only a little more obvious than the smiling affectlessness of pod people.
Beyoncé, "Formation" (2016).
rushthatspeaks showed me this video the night before the Super Bowl. The politics, the choreography, and the costuming are as powerful as everyone has been saying. It is also an earworm.Concrete Blonde, "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" (1990). I still don't think I ever figured out who's playing the vampire, but he has the profile for it. I cannot tell if it's an intended effect that he reminds me of Sweeney Todd.
Daisy Chainsaw, "Hope Your Dreams Come True" (1992). It's a short film of Angela Carter's "The Lady of the House of Love." It's very faithful. The Countess' cobwebbed bower is a great piece of silent-era set design. What else do you need to know?
The Dead Milkmen, "Punk Rock Girl" (1988). Why are there zombies? I presume they are some kind of metaphor for the deadening forces of suburban conformity, but I don't care. I love the band blowing the lip-synching and futzing around in the background of the video; I love the one glimpse we get of the punk rock girl herself. I can have this song stuck in my head for weeks on end.
Fiction, "The Apple (For Alan Turing)" (2014). The song is a biographical sketch of Alan Turing; the video sharpens the focus to his relationship with Arnold Murray and the fateful burglary in 1952, which Alan reported assuming—like a right-thinking person or a time traveler—that the police would be more interested in catching a burglar than prosecuting the complainant's sexuality. For all that, the video is not a downer.
FKA twigs, "Two Weeks" (2014). This one also came courtesy of Rush-That-Speaks. I think it's the closest we're ever going to get to a film of early Tanith Lee, especially The Birthgrave (1975) and The Storm Lord (1976). The camera pulls back with the deliberation of monumental things, where the only reason they make sense is distance.
Fountains of Wayne, "Stacy's Mom" (2003). On the one hand, like Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986), the video narrows the possibilities of the song in a way where I prefer the open-endedness of the original. On the other, the timing with which the lawnmower hits the mailbox is perfection. Your mileage.
Jack's Mannequin, "The Resolution" (2009). Unusually for me and music videos, I am basically indifferent to the song, but the storyline features the sea stalking the lead singer, so we're all set here.
Joy Division, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (1980). It turns out that my preferred version of this song is actually the earlier take from January 1980, known these days as the "Pennine Version," but the process of discovering this fact led to my watching the official music video for the first time last week. The filming is as DIY as it gets. They are all so astonishingly young.
The Killers, "Mr. Brightside" (2004). Look, I don't know if this video is actually any good. It can't count as the first music video I ever saw, because there was some unavoidable exposure in high school via my best friend who actually followed contemporary music, but it marks my adult engagement with the form. I ran into it late one night in New Haven and I am fairly certain it's a parody of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001), but mostly you should know that it contains someone angrily flipping a checkers board. I expect to be fond of it forever.
The Pack a.d., "Rocket" (2014) and "Animal" (2015). Maya Miller and Becky Black continue to make short genre films backed with terrifically thrashy garage rock. I really like them.
Shearwater, "Quiet Americans" (2016). I can think of many ways a video for this song could have gone, including science fiction, but the minimalist, political intimacy of this staging works seamlessly with the subterranean electronic sound. Again, the faces are great.
The Smiths, "The Queen Is Dead/There Is a Light That Never Goes Out/Panic" (1986). In hindsight it should really have occurred to me immediately that Derek Jarman would direct music videos for the Smiths. The blurred Super-8 sensuality of "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" reminds me a lot of The Angelic Conversation (1986).
The Spook School, "Binary" (2015). In which the band impersonate binary concepts of gender in silver-spray-painted cardboard robot costumes and then discard and destroy them. The sing-along at the end is fantastic.
Sun Seeker, "Georgia Dust" (2016). I'm not indifferent to the song, but I don't love it as much as the interpreting visuals. They give such good daylight horror. It's a witch song.
Taylor Swift, "Blank Space" (2014). It's like '60's-era Hitchcock with more cellphones and a vague sense of the Gothic supernatural. Rush-That-Speaks was reminded of Mélusine.
Vitas, "Opera #2" (2000). I actually saw this video for the first time about ten years ago, but it took me forever to track down due to an unaccountable failure to make any notes about a short musical film whose stranded siren protagonist sings at glass-shattering pitches, has gills, and lives alone with jars and jars of goldfish. I believe I have
greygirlbeast to thank for it.White Lung, "Hungry" (2016). What I like most about this video—besides the song—is the way it would be a conventional cautionary tale about the self-devouring nature of fame except for the haunting, which is serial and contagious.
Disagreements? Favorites I've missed? Questions, comments, howls of outrage? Someday I will be rested enough for critical thought again.
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