M.I.A. - Born Free (again)

I am still talking about this video.
The major critique of this video around the internet is the concerning the graphic sex and raw violence, but the shock scenes are not glamorous. If the director wanted to make an indelible mark on the viewer, he had to startle the view with the stark consequence of xenophobia and racism.

The problem with sex and violence is that it can be glorified. The director made the right choice by making the sex and the violence to ugly to glorify. The sex scene is dirty, frightening and humiliating, with two particularly unnappealing naked people.

The violence is uncomfortable. The most vivid scene portrays an officer shooting a child in the head. There is nothing to glorify in this scene. Even a fan of ultra-violence will feel uneasy watching a child get shot. The sex and violence really punctuates the injustice without glorifying it.

This video is about xenophobia/racism and power. The video tries to illustrate in stark detail what happens when the state or the group in power uses xenophobia/racism to maintain power.

The result is that people the people in the in-group (the naked couple) and those outside of the group (the redheads) are dehumanized. The dehumanization allows the state to rationalize denying privacy and denying rights and enacting violence and murder and eventually genocide.

I am pretty sure the point of the video is to allow you to draw parallels to conflicts around the world. The conflicts between Hispanics and Blacks in the US and Muslims in Europe are less violent right now, but as xenophobia and racism grow, they can lead to situations that we see in Israel with Palastinians, with Kurds in the Middle East or with Tamils in MIA's own Sri Lanka. If conflict is not resolved, it leads to what we saw in Rwanda, Armenia, Bosnia, and the Holocaust.

M.I.A. - Born Free

You can also watch it here,
http://miauk.com/
or here,
http://vimeo.com/11219730?hd=1
***Contains some nudity and violence

This is one of the best music videos I have ever seen. It features police that look like US SWAT violently breaking into apartments looking for someone and some intense music. Initially, Universal Music Group pulled the video from YouTube, but after some shaming by M.I.A. and other groups, the video has been put back up. Watch it, all the way through.

M.I.A. is the most important musician in the world. Her music is fuel for revolution.

M.I.A. is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, the daughter of Tamil Tigers and a refugee from the Sri Lankan conflict. She grew up in London studying art and slowly made the move to music. After touring with Elastica and Peaches and even directing a music video for Elastica, M.I.A. recorded a 6-song tape with a 4-track, an MC-505, and a mic. One song on the tape, Galang got a couple remixes and eventually being a world underground club hit.

The song Paper Planes off of the second album Kala is what made M.I.A. an international sensation. The song is a mix of genres with a strong political message about life in the third world and immigration into the first world. In the last years of the 00s, you couldn't watch a movie with a socio-political message without hearing Paper Planes. You have heard it even if you don't know you have heard it.

I say that M.I.A. is the most important musician in the world because her appeal spans rap, electronic, dance, indie, and even mainstream pop. You can hear her all across the globe, in the richest and the poorest areas in the world. Her music is not about heartbreak and love or sex and drugs, its about war, violence, domination, and most important, struggle for freedom.

Babybird - Unloveable (dir. Johnny Depp)

Johnny Depp as a director? Well its pretty good. Depp does a music video version of the popular high school literature class short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce. This is a plus for me because this is one of my favorite short stories from my teenage years. If you have a half an hour and want to know the inspiration for thousands of other novels, stories, television episodes, movies, and even video games, you should read the original Bierce short story.

This video is a good interpretation of the short story. Johnny Depp proves he is more than a multitalented actor...he can direct.

Babybird was a big name in the UK from 1995 to 2000, but Stephen Jones, Babybird's heart, hasn't done much for the last decade. If you like this song, you can check Babybird's 1996 albums Fatherhood and Ugly Beautiful, but even if you don't like the son, you should still check out these albums.

Nurses - Winter

Nurses "Winter" by Hans Lo from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.


The Nurses are psych-rock out of Portland OR.  Their music is intimate and entrancing with a touch of haunting weirdness.  Most of the songs feature an old echo-y piano that drifts beautifully in and out of tune supplemented by some other oddly altered instrument.  What gets you are the ethereal vocal harmonies that span several octaves.

This song is off of The Nurses latest album Apple's Acre.  The first time I played the album when the LP came out, everyone in the house came out of their rooms at some point during the album and said, "Who is this?  I know I have heard them before."  I don't think anyone had heard The Nurses before, but there is something that feels so at home, so natural and familiar about their music while being completely new.  Apple's Acre isn't an album that needs to grow on you.  It just feels right the first time you listen to it. 

The VCR kaleidoscope collage really compliments the music.  It has the same calming, homemade simplicity the makes the song so wonderful.

Weezer - Pink Triangle

Rivers Cuomo wrote two of the greatest and most important albums of the 90's.  Both albums fathered entire sub-genres.  In 1994, Weezer's The Blue Album is a cornerstone of geek rock and it inspired countless nerdy high school garage bands and even some famous ones (see Ok Go).  Two years later, Pinkerton was released, but wasn't well received.  Rolling Stone called it one of the worst albums of 1996.  However, as you well know, Rolling Stone was barely relevant in the 90's and isn't relevant at all in 2010.  Pinkerton grew in popularity after 1996 and is one of the cornerstones of both Blue Sweater Emo and Eyeliner Emo.

Unfortunately, Rivers Cuomo took the rejection of his masterpiece pretty bad and Weezer stopped playing for nearly four years.  As the early Internet was starting to explode, the online fan base was exploding with it.  Armed with 14 new songs and minus Matt Sharp (bass player, founder of The Rentals), Weezer sold out several tours in 2000.  With tons of hype and excited fans, they went to the studio to record their third album.  They enlisted Ric Ocasek of the Cars, the producer of the Blue Album, to return and produce number three.

This is where the story goes sour.  An exec from Geffen, their record label, came by to hear the songs and he didn't like them.  So what did the band do?  They moved to a new studio and Rivers wrote an album's worth of songs on the spot.  Instead of recording meticulously crafted, interesting, heart-felt music as they once did, Weezer recorded 10 simple, formulaic, bland, lifeless songs for the Green Album.  

And that was it.  Weezer, one of the most important bands of the 90's, died, and in its place and empty space. 
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Pink Triangle was a song on Pinkerton, but this video wasn't released until 2004.  It was created by Karl Koch, the super roadie and band documentarian.  He is a great guy.  Back in 2000, me and some friends followed Weezer around the Midwest for three tours.  I had been talking to Karl every night after the shows, he was an awesome guy.  We didn't have tickets for a show in Columbia, Missouri and it was sold out.  It looked like we weren't getting in, but then I bumped into Karl.  He said we were lucky Weezer didn't have many friends in Missouri and he let us in as guests of the band.  We got in before everyone else and stood right in the front.  That was the best rock show I have seen. 

Thanks Karl.  I love the video.

Crystal Castles - Crimewave (with HEALTH)

I can't say this video is really that great. It is about the hard life of the alienated, ostracized zombie. I posted it because the song is just so damn good. HEALTH should have recommended Eric Wareheim to direct because he did a great job on their amazing video.

The xx - Islands

The xx was all the rage last year. Their calm, minimalist stylings have made them a favorite of music critics and anyone that wears all black and has a dramatic hair swoop. Their music is good, but all of the songs sound the same. Hopefully there will be a bit more diversity on the next album.

Islands is a good song and the music video makes it so much better. The video really fits well with their entire sound as a band: a well-choreographed, artful construction played over and over again with hypnotic repetition. I am really not a fan of interpretive dance, I am drawn to this video. There is so much simultaneously going on in each short clip that you find yourself focusing one person or one dance move for several cycles. You can't really take in everything that is going even in one viewing. I guess if you can appreciate the repitition and subtle beauty of the video, you should be able to appreciate The xx.

Flaming Lips - Powerless

The Flaming Lips are still making albums after over twenty-five years and they are still on the cutting edge of rock, more relevant than ever.  Any band can continue to tour and record far past their expiration date and riding their previous fame to sell a crappy new album that is forgotten after the first week.  (I am looking your way Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne, and Brett Michaels.  Sure, you made good music at one time in your life, but you partied too much and you really don't have any soul left to make good music.  Stop pissing on your legacy.  You don't want to be remembered as sad old men churning out trash.)  But The Flaming Lips are still making influential albums that will one day have an effect on our unborn children.

This is a simple but effective video.  As with all Flaming Lips visuals, there is a mix of creepy and happy, absurdity and beauty, unsettling and erotic.  I love the ending.  Blind freedom.

LCD Soundsystem - Drunk Girls

Welcome back to music videos Spike Jonze. Over the past half a decade, Jonze has only done a handful of videos, the only one of note being the Kanye West's Flashing Light, which Jonze only co-directed.  Spike Jonze is one of the best, if not the best, music video director.  I could go through the list of amazing music video that Jonze has won award for, but I should probably just post them.  Someone remind me to a week on Spike Jonze. 

This video is madness.  James Murphy, the man behind LCD Soundsystem, along with the keyboardist and drummer are just trying to sing about drunk girls when a horde of grinning pandas start hazing them like a bunch of drunk frat boys.  It revives memories of fourth grade bullies in the boys bathroom minus the swirlies.  As the song goes on, the assault on the musicians gets more and more violent and a little unsettling. There are parts that remind me of the gang rape scenes in A Clockwork Orange. 

Jonze is really successful at capturing the raw energy and the creepiness in the room and converting it to music video. There is also an eerie similarity to the latest Ok Go video, This Too Shall Pass .  While this LCD Soundsystem video is not an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine, it is one uncut, hand camera  shot following around the mayhem and people in white suits make a mess in a big white warehouse.  Also, both of these video include live sound from the video recording on top of the music track.  Perhaps this is a trend we will begin to see more of. 

Chairlift - Evident Utensils

Chairlift is a band that got its name because of a video...well a commercial...an IPod commercial.  Their song Bruises will forever be associated with the 4th generation IPod Nano.

This is a video is made possible by the rise of the online digital video. It is inspired by the problems that occur in compressing video and streaming video online.  Sometimes when a video isn't displaying properly, you see a leftover image that is stuck on the screen.  Slowly as the video progresses, the stuck pixels are replaced and the video goes back to normal.  The director is replicating these residual artifacts to create a unique visual style.  All made possible by broken music videos.

Major Lazer - Keep it Going Louder

Major Lazer is a music project from DJ's Diplo and Switch. You may know the them from their work with MIA and Diplo from remixes of tracks by artists from Kanye West and Brittany Spears to Radiohead and Daft Punk. Both Diplo and Switch do some killer remixes, but Major Lazer is the best thing that either of them have done.

The music is pulling from some of the more popular dance music of the past decade with a handful of characters doing over-autotuned vocals.  It might not be music you want to listen to while you are sitting around the house but the live show is where it is at.

I saw Major Lazer last week and the live show is unbelievable.  Smoke, a hi-tech laser show, simulated sex, and thousands of sweaty hipsters jumping up and down.

The video is not far from the feel of the live show.  Its like tripping through the cover of one of those old geometric Trapper Keepers.

The creepy, weirdness of the video isn't surprising being that it is directed by Eric Wareheim, Eric of Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job.  He has directed nearly ten music videos in the past several years but they aren't all orgies of the absurd.  Wareheim has shown a great range of ability in his last video he directed.  For the band HEALTH, Eric Wareheim has created a stark homage to the slasher films of the last decade.  If he is going to be making videos as fresh as these two, he may need to dump Tim and just do music videos.

The Apples in Stereo - Dance Floor

 

This first video is a short film prequel to the actual music video.  Its funny and has a kitschy 70s public access television or instructional video aesthetic.



The Apples in Stereo are part of the greatest music collective of all time, the Elephant Six Collective.  Ok, so maybe they are the greatest, but the E6 Collective has made some of my favorite music.  Bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, The Gerbils, Elf Power, and Of Montreal (who are technically "friends of Elephant Six").

In the videos, Robert Schneider plays the bearded scientist who has harnessed the power of space and time and the genius behind The Apples in Stereo, but he is oh so much more than that.  He is the also the genius behind the recording and production of the greatest album pressed, Neutral Milk Hotel's Aeroplane Over the Sea (so my love of Neutral Milk Hotel is really showing through here).  He also recorded, mixed, produced NMH's On Avery Island, Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, all of The Apples in Stereo's albums and a couple more.

The Apples in Stereo have been playing for nearly 20 years and have continued to stay relevant while still maintaining their original sound.  Heavily influenced by the Beach Boys and the Beatles along with some Pink Floyd, they have created their own pysch-power-pop sound.

The video is is fun and funny.  Elijah Wood, who runs a record label that is putting out the album, is a great addition in the video.  Of course I was also thrilled to see all of the Elephant 6 references (Schneider's t-shirt and the name of the time machine).