I take what I said about MGMT. This song should be their single.
It has been the soundtrack to my brain for the past couple days. I think MGMT is brainwashing me to listen to Brian Eno. I found myself listening to Brian Eno album Here Come the Warm Jets yesterday and my head is a little clearer.
I love the jumpy, manic feel this song has and the weird key they play in (sounds all horror show). The song reminds me of a band from Peoria, Illinois called The Amazing Kill-o-Watts. I went through their back catalogue trying to find the song it reminded me of, but I was unsuccessful. Anyone from get the same feeling I do?
Dum Dum Girls feel like lofi-ed 60s pop rock with a hint of 90s girl-la-la twee. They have certainly have a sunny, summery feel, like the Jacuzzi Boys, although Dum Dum Girls come from the West coast. With the hot summer ramping up, this is the music I feel like walking to while sweat drips down the back of my neck.
This video has a washed out female Easy Rider feel with lofi video effects to match the song. My favorite part is the scene that looks like a clip from a French new wave film with subtitles. It gives smoking that sexy ennui before it become a dirty habit associated with sleazy car salesmen and cancer.
Oh how the mighty fall, well at least stumble. MGMT helped usher in a wave of good and not-so-good electro-pop. With a handful of singles, MGMT permeated pop culture in 2008-09. Kids and Time to Pretend showed up not only in every hipster's party mix, but in teen dramas like Gossip Girl, clothing store soundtracks, and commercials. French President Nicolas Sarkozy illegally puts Kids in some of his videos and played it at rallies and had to copyright infringement. (This happened as he was trying to pass a law to deny Internet access to file-sharers)
The point is that MGMT was one-hot-hit-making machine. Everyone was salivating for the next round of pop hits to accompany the kissing scene for their teen vampire show or sell their Bar-B-Que sauce or to play in the background to convince the young kids that they are still hip. But that didn't happen.
Instead, MGMT put out a record with no singles, no electro-pop, and nothing that sounds like the two songs that everyone knows. Ad-men and suburban teenagers everywhere moved on to tow-headed teen boys that sing like Stevie Wonder.
The record isn't bad at all. Congratulations isn't the wonder-child album that Oracular Spectacular is. It's much more rock and roll and pulls from old psych-pop and maybe some geek rock from the 80s.
The problem here is that MGMT is MGMT. If this record was released by an unknown group called MGNT or MGNR, the album would have been consumed in a completely different way. Congratulations is being panned for being inaccessible and pretentious, which may be true, but it is mainly being panned for not being Kids or Time to Pretend.
I want to talk about the video, but it is forgettable. The duo has shed their wild and colorful rag-tag outfits for tight jeans, Buddy Holly glasses, and plaid shits. For being a psych-pop song, this video is surprisingly strait-laced. Magical IKEA furniture that dispenses pink ice cream, contains a dollhouse and an angel ballerina sounds like it was dreamed up by a committee of the suburban teens that watch the vampire show. Oh I get it...it was all a dream. Yawn.
If you are bored you can count the excessive number of dashes I used to this post, I will send you a psychedelic unicorn that poops pink ice cream.
This isn't exactly a music video as much as it is a live performance, but it should be the music video for this song.
The X-Ray Spex were a short-lived teenage punk band from the late 70s in the UK. They are sometimes credited as the first grrrl rock band more than a decade before the riot grrrl movement and this song could easily be considered the first riot grrrl song. Poly Styrene, the woman screeching and wailing, paved the way for decades of feminist rock. See the Raincoats, Sleater Kinney, Patti Smith, and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
This song is manic emancipatory rock. Poly Styrene starts the song, "Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard. Well I think, OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS!" and never relents.
zZz is a Dutch duo that uses just a drum kit, an organ, and a some effects. I don't really know much about them other than, I like this song and I love this video.
Whether the the director intended it or not, this video is an homage to the long running Korean television show Kasou Taishou. Twice a year, there is a competition to impress the audience with the most innovative and entertaining skits. One specific type of skit became popular and now the show is known for it.
The people competing on Kasou Taishou create live special effects. The point is to act out something that would normally be done with camera tricks and editing. The most famous skit from Kasou Taishou is Matrix Ping Pong. It was a hot internet meme several years ago so most of you have probably come across it. There are thirty years of skits from this show, some more clever than Matrix Ping Ping.
The zZz video is at inspired by Kasou Taishou, but also include some fresh ideas. Pay attention to the progress bar slowly being painted throughout the whole.
How about we start with Frederik Valentin. This is Frederik Valentin. His favorite food is pizza and his favorite quote is from Futurama. Complicated Universal Cum is Frederik Valentin's new project. He is a Danish artist that is also in bands such as Hard Rock Power Spray and Vomit Supreme, whose influences are: "Weed!" I have heard Vomit Supreme before, but I wasn't particularly interested.
Complicated Universal Cum, on the other hand, I love. This song is beautiful and I really enjoy all of the songs they have posted on their myspace page. It doesn't sound or feel like Valentin's other bands. Its calm and more lofi and subdued. I Can Hardly Wait reminds me a lot of Mazzy Star's Fade Into You.
The video is also a perplexing juxtaposition in comparison to Valentin's previous work. On one hand, this video is beautiful portrait of a long kiss that sparks all those feelings you have when you are really in love with someone. So in love, that you can just sit next to each other in silence, stare into each others eyes and make-out.
On the other hand, judging by the comments on the video, it also taken in a completely different light. Here is a gem from engmoodyzeid on Youtube, "OMG....toooooo hoooooot.... ill make sure tht my next gf will be an EX-lesbo." The video is not hardcore or pornographic, it is soft and passionate, but it is also two beautiful girls kissing.
The directors of this video had to be aware of what they were making, especially put into context with Valentin's previous work. They had to be aware that their video would be appealing on different levels for different people. If they were only going after the engmoodyzeid's on YouTube, they would have made the video look more like a late night softcore porn on Cinemax. There is a definite beauty in this video but there is also another element that reflects how our society views homosexuality.
The YouTube version of this video is flagged as content for 18 years and older. Why? There is no nudity, just a long passionate kiss. I guess homosexual content equals adult content on YouTube.
The Black Keys have a sound that is reminiscent of the early blues recording. They sound as if they were performed in a dark basement through a tin can. They are a two piece, guitar and drums, but they sound much bigger than a two-piece. Dan Auerbach uses a loop pedal, so he is able to lay down one dingy, distorted guitar riff after another. They find a way to use some of the best parts of old blues and still make it sound fresh.
Their videos are usually low-budget and comical and usually involves some sort of fight or violence. This video is no exception. What I like about this video is lip syncing kids. And they really found some good kid version look-alikes.
Sci-fi Music Videos Week, Day 2, Sigur Rós - Untitled #1 (Vaka)
Vaka truly illustrates the potential of the music video as an art form itself.
Sigur Ros is a prolific Icelandic band that you have probably heard in a movie, if you have heard an album. They have a very distinct sound, ethereal and atmospheric with very high-pitched vocals. Jónsi Birgisson sings both in Icelandic and Hopelandic, a nonsense language made up of syllable from the Icelandic language.
They started on Iceland's most well-known label, Smekkleysa (Bad Taste). It's a label started by the Sugarcubes, Iceland's indie gods from the 80s who helped shoot the lead singer, Bjork, to international fame. Iceland is a tiny island nation with a population smaller than Minneapolis, but they produce a lot of good music.
The video shares the sullen beauty that is exemplified in the song. School children bundle up to go outside and play in the flurries of ash of nuclear winter. Wearing WW2 style gas masks, they throw ashballs and make ashmen. The video ends a young boys mask falls off and he slip away.
The ending is very peculiar for a music video. The song ends nearly a minute before the end of the video, and the rest is done in silence, as if giving priority to the video and not the song. However, I don't believe this is the case. They are giving priority to the experience. The music and the visuals are interwoven to create a new work that conveys a new message and elicits a different emotional response. The absence of sound in the last minute is no longer silence, but a part of the song and completes the final product, the music video.
Sci-fi Music Videos Week, Day 1, Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
Yeasayer is an experimental Brooklyn band with obvious world music influences. They have just released their new record Odd Blood. It is about time. It has been nearly three years.
This video is an homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film, Holy Mountain. If you have never heard of it, check out the trailer here.
Holy Mountain is amazing and all sorts of messed up. Supposedly, the cast meditated together for 3 months before the shooting and were on psychedelic drugs for at least one scene. John Lennon and Yoko through in some money for production which doesn't surprise me because the movie is like a visual interpretation of one of her songs.
You could argue that this video isn't exactly sci-fi, but avant-garde or surrealist. To you I say, shut up and watch the video.
Buster Keaton is a like a video interpretation of an Adbusters magazine. Or maybe a four minute G-Rated ad for American Apparel. I am not exactly sure what is going on here, why this woman is going through hoops named after life stages or why someone is dressed up as the Nobel Prize in Literature. There may be some po-mo symbolic reason for everything, but I don't get it.
What I do get is that this video is that this video is beautiful. I love the vivid colors on the drab scenery and the amazing costumes made out of paper. The art direction in this video is stellar.
Quadron's a Denmark duo that just released their first album this year. I have read a couple reviews that compare the music to early 60s R&B, but I don't hear it in this song. You can hear it in the instrumentals in some of their others songs (check their myspace). I think the music has a distinctive late 80s/early 90s R&B sound, especially the bass beat underlying ever song and the singers vocal style. I know I am splitting hairs, but there is a big difference. What do you think?
Small Black (check out their blog) is a two-piece from Long Island who has been touring with Washed Out with a self-released EP that has been getting some hype. They have the lo-fi summery synth sound that is all the rage right now (see this Jacuzzi Boys video). There is something really peaceful about this song.
This video is a beautiful slice of the life of an aging surfer. The guy with the handlebar mustache is the lead singer's uncle Matt. Its reminds me a lot of Darren Aronofsky's stunning film The Wrestler from 2008. Its about a washed up professional wrestler who can't give up the professional that is killing him. Its the best film from 2008.
If you haven't seen the wrestler, you may have seen the 2009 movie that basically stole the script from the wrestler, inserted a country music singer, and gave the story a sappy, happy ending. That movie was called Crazy Heart. Well, this video is like a real-life version of the Wrestler or Crazy Heart, but doesn't rip-off either films. Its beautiful in its own way.
Believe it or not, but this group started as a black metal band called Skull. They were part of the Swedish metal scene and they reinvented themselves in early 2000. In order to set themselves apart from their roots and the rest of the Swedish grindcore bands, they chose the name Teddybears.
Cobrastyle has been around since 2004 and you have probably heard it somewhere. Its been in television shows, movies, advertisements, videogames, corporate shopping background music, and sports games in between clips of 2 Unlimited's Get Ready for This and Techtronic's Pump Up the Jam. It is one of the most recognized songs that you don't know who sings and you don't know the title.
Other than being inserted as the background of every form of mass entertainment, there is another reason that you recognize this song. Cobrastyle is the result of mixing several songs from 80s artists like Sugar Hill Gang and Fine Young Cannibals. Kid Rock refenences some of the same songs in his song Bawitaba. So even if its possible that you haven't heard this song, you have heard the songs that make up this song.
The video is a great commentary and on the excesses of rock and roll of the 80s. Its a documentary style Spinal Tap-esque video with giant teddy bear heads. Its funny with great references to famous rock and roll scandals. I also love that they are playing an Atari game that is 8-bit. (Atari is only 4-bit for those of you not nerdy enough to know.)
I now this post is sounding negative, but I am not anti-Cobrastyle. There is a reason that this song is so ubiquitous, its catchy and fun. Its a mix of styles and time periods. While there is a lot of 80s elements in this song and video, it doesn't sound or look like the 80s at all. Its unique in a familiar way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 theKanye West'sFlashing 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 behindLCD 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 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.
