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passionate-reply · 3 years

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Great Albums is back for a third time! This week, we discuss Dazzle Ships, the avant-garde masterpiece that was so infamously weird, it almost “sank” the pop career of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Or did it? As usual, you can find a full transcript of the video under the break, if you’d like to read it instead.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums. Today, I’ll be talking about an album that many would consider OMD’s best, and many would consider the last great album they ever made: 1983’s Dazzle Ships, their fourth studio LP. It has a reputation that precedes it, as a strange, experimental, and avant-garde album. And I can’t argue with that too much, when it has tracks that sound like "ABC Auto-Industry."

The most obvious thing one can say about Dazzle Ships is that it’s dense and rich with samples. You’ll hear found sounds ranging from a “Speak and Spell” toy to a radio broadcast from Czechoslovakia. It’s a magpie’s nest constructed of garbage and baubles, collage-like and conscientiously artificial. And OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey managed to make it before sampling became easier and hence more widespread later in the 1980s, thanks to advancements in digital technology. In its own day, it was, famously, a huge flop, baffling even the critics, which makes it tempting to argue that the world simply wasn’t ready for it. Popular legend says that Humphreys and McCluskey were essentially forced to make increasingly soft, pop-oriented music for years afterward, usually at the hands of their label’s higher-ups.

Is that story really true? Well, I don’t know, and I’m not sure if anybody really does. But I think it’s important that we entertain some doubt. Regardless of its actual veracity, this legend is offering us a simplistic narrative of art and capital butting heads, and one that we see repeated all too often in music journalism. It’s a story that expects us to believe that experimental music is good by default, and the natural goal of music and all the people who make it--and, conversely, that accessible music is bad, and anyone who writes a song you can dance to is always after profit, never craft.

Ultimately, though, the most important reason why I’m asking you to leave this question at the gate is that it’s simply a less interesting way to think about art. What I think is truly ingenious about OMD is their ability to combine a pop sensibility with that bleeding-edge experimentation, and vice versa. I don’t think of Dazzle Ships as just an inscrutable, esoteric musical ready-made, but rather something capable of animating and enriching a bunch of otherwise mundane sounds. A word I might use for it is "challenging," because it isn't simply off-putting--it has a certain charm that invites you to stick around and work through it, and you don't feel like it's a waste of your time. I think the underlying pop DNA offered by Dazzle Ships is a big part of that.

In “Genetic Engineering,” the samples from that Speak & Spell are contrasted with a more traditional chorus, which rises above the chaos, stirring and anthemic. It’s a song full of friction, not only between these musical ideas, but in ideas about technology and our future. Like many great works of electronic music, especially earlier in its history, Dazzle Ships is deeply concerned with science and technology, and the ways they’ve structured our world. These guys wrote “Enola Gay” a few years earlier, sure, but there’s much more than Luddite, dystopian thinking here! Dazzle Ships walks a tightrope between romantic adoration of the promise of a better tomorrow, and the tempered uncertainty we’re forced to develop, when we witness the devastation our most horrifying inventions have wrought already. Something that helps sell the former is the motif of childhood: in addition to the Speak & Spell, “Genetic Engineering” also features a children’s toy piano, and prominently references “children” in its lyrics. And “Telegraph,” the album’s other single, sees fit to reference “Daddy.”

Touches like these, and the centering of not-so-new technologies like telegraphy and radio, carry us backward in time. Dazzle Ships has a sense of nostalgia for the technological explosion of the Midcentury, when household technologies were improving in ways that saved time and labour, and faith in “better living through science” was high. It’s not a wistful or introspective nostalgia, but rather one that taps into the bustling excitement of living through that era. That retro styling helps us situate ourselves in a childlike mindset: optimistic, but somewhat naive. Children are highly imaginative, and become enthralled with possibility, but don’t always understand every implication their actions have.

But, as I said, “Telegraph” and “Genetic Engineering” were the album’s singles; the typical track on *Dazzle Ships* sounds more like “ABC Auto-Industry.” The track listing is structured such that these more conventional songs are surrounded by briefer, and more abrasive, intrusions. They become signals in the noise, as though we’re listening to them on the radio--or ships, rising above some stormy seas. Several tracks, such as “International,” also feature a more dissonant intro, on top of that, crowding their main melodies inward.

Over the years, many critics have been quick to contrast Dazzle Ships with OMD’s other albums, but I actually think it has a lot in common with their preceding LP, 1981’s Architecture & Morality, and seems to me to flow naturally from the direction the band had already been going in. Architecture & Morality is a lively mix, with moody instrumentals like “Sealand,” guitar-driven numbers like “The New Stone Age,” and catchy, intuitive pop songs like “Souvenir.” Architecture and Morality proved to be their most successful album, when its title track sounds like this. I fail to see how it’s tremendously different than the title track of Dazzle Ships, which leads us on a harrowing sea chase, with radar pings quickly closing in.

That nautical theme is a great segue to discuss the album’s visual motif. Like all of OMD's first five albums, its sleeve was designed by Peter Saville, most famous for his stunning work for New Order. The cover and title were inspired by a painting Saville had seen, Edward Wadsworth’s *Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool,* which portrays WWI warships painted in striking, zebra-like geometric patterns. These sharply contrasting “razzle dazzle” designs weren’t “camouflage,” but rather served to confuse enemy forces’ attempts to track them, and predict their motions. Dazzle ships were killing machines that fought dirty...and they were also beautiful. It’s a potent, complex symbol, and it’s a natural fit for an album that’s also capricious, perplexing, and captivating in its uniquely modern terror. Saville’s sleeve design features both a die-cut design as well as a gatefold; peeking through the cover’s “portholes” reveals the interior, where we find a map of the world, divided by time zones. It’s yet another reminder of how technology has reshaped the planet, connecting the human race while also creating divisions.

Earlier, I argued that Dazzle Ships isn’t that different from OMD’s preceding LP, and I’d also suggest that their follow-ups to it aren’t all that different, either. It’s easy to see the influence of Dazzle Ships on their most recent work, made after reforming the group in the late 00s, and informed by the critical re-evaluation and cult acclaim of their alleged masterpiece. But even in the 80s, they basically continued the pattern of layering easy to love, “obvious single choice” tracks alongside more experimental, sample-heavy ones. Compare the title track of their sixth LP, 1985's *Crush.*

Even the greatest of pop hitmakers can't maintain a streak in the charts forever--it's not the nature of mainstream pop charts. Not even in the 1980s, when you could get away with quite a lot of electronic weirdness...at least for a while. Looking back and listening to "Maid of Orleans," it's almost hard to believe it was one of OMD's biggest hits. Is it really less weird than something like "Telegraph"? Perhaps they had simply reached the end of their imperial phase...whether they really had that stern talking-to or not.

It's not so much that Dazzle Ships isn't weird, so much as it is foreseeable that a nerdy, left-of-center band like OMD would have come up with it. Dazzle Ships IS excellent--it’s a Great Album! But it's good enough that I think it deserves to be heard and valued on its own terms. The album is too goddamn good--too compelling, too spell-binding--to be reduced to "that one album the plebs were too dumb to really get." I'm not clearing the air because I think this album is overrated, but because I think it deserves better, deeper discourse than it gets. A truly great album is great whether it sells or it doesn't, right? My advice is to never let art intimidate you, no matter how obtuse people say it is. Send your ship on that plunge into the dark waters of the unknown--you might find something beautiful.

That said...my favourite track overall is “Radio Waves,” an irresistibly fun cut that could easily have become a third single. Since “Genetic Engineering” and “Telegraph” live on side one of the record, “Radio Waves” is really the only “reprieve” we get on side two, smack in its middle. It really stands out, in context--almost like the opposite of how a more conventional album might have one out-there track that catches you off guard. Aside from all of that, though, the song also stands perfectly well alone. I have a real soft spot for music about music, how it’s made and transmitted, and “Radio Waves” is simply one hell of a ride.

Thanks for reading!

#great albums #music #omd #orchestral manoeuvres in the dark #album review #album reviews #dazzle ships #peter saville

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letterboxd · 4 years

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Housing Crisis.

Vivarium director Lorcan Finnegan talks to Steve Newall about his surreal suburban sci-fi nightmare.

Vivarium sees a young couple (Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg) looking to buy a home together, find themselves trapped in Yonder, a bizarre housing development full of identical family residences. In this interview, conducted following the film’s screening at the New Zealand International Film Festival, Lorcan Finnegan talks about his intriguing film, the horrors of housing, The Quiet Earth, and his experiences with Nathan Barley and Charlie Brooker.

Is the lifestyle sold in Vivarium where you see us going or are we already there? Lorcan Finnegan: I think that’s where we are. Except it’s just a little bit more exaggerated to highlight the absurdity of it. So it was kind of us taking the way we live already, more or less and just kind of amplifying it up so that you can see how weird it is.

You mentioned a housing crisis back home in Ireland during last night’s Q&A. Is it the same as here, where capital has been sequestered away by the wealthy and everyone else is a bit fucked? Yes. Basically, a massive divide, and there’s whole entire families living in hotels. I listened to a radio interview recently and they were talking about how that may seem like a nice proposal, “Yeah. We live in a hotel,” but a whole entire family in one room after a few weeks it’s going to start getting chaotic.

Our government was paying for people to live in motels. Yeah. But why?

Because people were living in cars. Families were living in cars. Buildings are left locked up because people are waiting for the right time to sell them because they’re waiting for the market to pick back up and there aren’t compulsory purchase orders put in place by the governments and there isn’t enough affordable housing. Housing’s just become this thing that you can’t actually buy a house. You have to be really rich.

I think you might’ve described it as an obsession last night. It’s definitely an obsession here. There’s a conversation earlier in the film, I think it might be with one of the parents at the school about the market…? Yeah, she’s saying, “The market’s going through the roof. You should really jump on it now.” And Gemma [Imogen Poots] says, “Oh, we’re going to go and see the estate agents later.”

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots in dystopian nightmare ‘Vivarium’.

That sort of exchange fills up so much space in everyday conversation. Yeah. It’s a real obsession in Ireland, owning property. The idea of land ownership and all of that kind of thing. It’s strange. It’s just a mindset though because the Spanish live in apartments and rent their entire lives and that’s not considered strange and things are more affordable. I mean, obviously, the same thing happened in Spain. It’s a bit of a mess there as well and Greece. But yeah, the housing crisis really is an ongoing thing.

We made Foxes, a short film, in 2010 roughly but the time it was finished was 2011 and that was already reacting to something that was happening around 2005 which was just increasingly just getting worse. And since making that, made another film, Without Name, which is sort of about a property developer as well. It’s very different, about a guy who’s a surveyor who’s sent out to measure a piece of forest for a shady developer and the forest has a kind of spirit that protects it from this person and it gets psychedelic and weird.

And then by the time we came around to doing Vivarium, which we’d been working on for a few years just between things and gradually building the script up, it was all back again. We’d come full circle and it’s the exact same problems all over again. So within the film, the film has this kind of cyclical arc to it. It opens with footage of birds that have that kind of lifecycle as well and it seems that we just keep on repeating the same thing as well. It’s the cycle of strangeness.

My partner made an observation about the film, which was when you take away the contemporary issues it’s a very bleak analysis of what it means to be a family or what your purpose in life is. Yeah [laughs]. That’s the existential dread part [more laughs].

How’s your existential dread? I don’t know—we were just tapping into the anxieties of young people to kind of shake them up a little bit. That was an intention. I remember when we started into the script we were thinking what is it that scares people in their late 20s, early 30s these days? What is it that actually scares them as opposed to some sort of big monster? Godzilla was a product of the fear of atomic energy or nuclear war.

We were trying to coming up with a version in a stranger way of a monster, like the estate agent who would lead you to your doom. And people have this anxiety of moving to the suburbs and getting kind of trapped there and losing all sense of purpose and their life just sort of dwindling away while they repay the mortgage.

You had quite a sort of negative slant on the concept of mortgages. Yeah. That you just pay it off until you die.

Right, you can just dig that hole. Just dig that hole, keep digging that hole. Yeah. Dig the hole. Yeah. Keep on digging. Yeah. I mean to me it’s a big sick joke—the film—in a way. I don’t think it’s necessarily saying you shouldn’t do this, it’s just sort of highlighting how odd it is that we do it and that it’s not a necessarily the only society possibility. There’s other versions, other outcomes could happen. The little girl at the start of the film, Molly—she says she doesn’t like the way things are. So she’s like hope for the next generation.

Your casting of the other child that arrives in Yonder is amazing and you make some really interesting choices of what barriers you present to the audience to make us not really sympathise with the kid. Particularly the modulation of that voice. That voice is fucking weird. It was written as being weird. A weird kind of mimic of them but not quite right. And because he doesn’t have anybody else to copy, it’s kind of a hybrid of voices and we did have to dehumanise him because the real kid did sound quite sweet. He had a lisp as well [laughs]. He’s brilliant.

So we edited the film with the real kid’s voice and were just thinking about ways of what we’re going to do. And then we had the idea—myself and the editor—that what if we use Johnathan Aris as the voice of the kid because he’s the first estate agent that comes in. And so we got him in to do a little demo and he just did a few lines. And it really worked. It was really weird but it worked. It wasn’t quite right yet but we thought, “Okay. That’s what we’re going to do. when we finish it.” So then when we did we got him in for a whole day and he did the entire film as ADR and then we spent a lot of time in Denmark with the sound mix designer and tweaking that and kind of shifting the pitches and syncing it to his lips and adding in little bits of the little boy on either end of the word like coming in and coming out accenting his lip smacks so that it would sit into his mouth more. It was really tricky but I think it was worth the effort.

I was thinking about how the uniformity of the town of Yonder must have been a real advantage when it comes to shooting. Did you go into this going, “This is great. We’ve got all these advantages because we know we can just reverse this and do that and…” No. No. It was more like a terrible nightmare [laughs]. It’s like being dropped into this thing where you’ve got barely any time to make the film and this is all you have to make what you thought was going to be much bigger. Yeah. It was pretty stressful. It had all been storyboarded and planned a certain way which all had to change there and then with the clock ticking. Actually, on the very first day, there was a power cut because they hadn’t got a generator in Belgium. They were going off the local power and this massive warehouse—there wasn’t a sound stage—and, yeah, the power went for half a day. So we lost half a day the first day which meant the whole schedule was messed up and the storyboards were no longer viable for what we had to shoot. So we had to figure out how to rearrange shots, minimise the amount of coverage to be able to shoot the scenes.

So much is unseen in the film and that really works to the advantage of the audience. Was it a limitation thing for you or did you know that you could make it more interesting that way? We thought about showing how the whole thing works and all that. We do have our version in our heads, how it all works underneath and the whole lifecycle of these other things. But I found it more interesting to just give little bits of it than show it. What we’d show wouldn’t be as good as what you’d imagine anyway, probably.

I guess it helps if you are on the same page, that you have a bit of architecture in mind. Yeah, exactly. You know what the rules are to the place and all that kind of thing. Like with the weird fluffy clouds. It took people quite a while to get on board with that [laughs]. I was like, “No, it will look good.” And it needed that sort of storybook aesthetic to me anyway, that it’s this sort of surrealist painting, being trapped in that world. Do you remember The Witches—the Roald Dahl film that Nick Roeg directed—and there’s the little girl who’s trapped in the painting by a witch? That had some sort of profound effect on me when I saw it, it looked really creepy to be trapped in something that looked like a painting.

You mentioned The Quiet Earth last night and so I have a parochial responsibility to ask what resonates for you with that film. Well, actually the last sequence part of Vivarium was inspired by that. And also just maybe some of the kind of crossfading or aesthetic. I know it was ’85 or something like that but it had a sort of 70s vibe to it. And the quantum strangeness of The Quiet Earth… Vivarium has that quantum element, things shifting and changing and loops and kind of thing. And the idea of being alone in kind of suburban environments, with nobody else. When we were in development, we were watching everything—all those sci-fis that dealt with similar themes and we really liked The Quiet Earth. Very good performances all and the lead character just being a normal-looking guy which they used to do in the past instead of these kind of Gillette models.

Bruno Lawrence in Geoff Murphy’s ‘The Quiet Earth’ (1985).

So this film was obviously, a very difficult process for you. How do you feel about doing more at this point? Did you get PTSD from this experience? I actually probably did for a while, yeah. But yeah, it’s a weird masochistic compulsion. You make a film, you go through agony and then when you finish it you just want to go and do another one. But the next one is potentially less complicated. A little bit more in the real world with elements of the supernatural, and then another one that is a little bit insane, with a location that’s augmented to extend it and make it into sort of an environment but not creating an entire environment. The tricky thing with Vivarium is it always had to have a certain vibe to it and for Yonder to have no wind, no rain, artificial light, and feel very synthetic but at the same time tangible. So I don’t think they’ll be doing another one with quite as limited kind of environment to create and build. Not for a while anyway.

I threatened to bring up Nathan Barley when we first sat down. It feels like an increasingly prescient kind of work. I think sort of an amalgam of sort of cynicism and futurism. What did you take away from your time working on that show and just around Charlie Brooker projects in general? I mean I wasn’t really on Nathan Barley. I went to set a few times and I had to dress up as a lampshade in one episode. Actually, I think it was the first time seeing a director working. It was Chris Morris directing that. I remember he was closing his eyes for a while, thinking about the scene, then he was like, “Okay,” and then got stuck into it again. I thought that was really interesting.

I did do graphic design in college but I kept on doing narrative work and things. I don’t know why, I just kept on doing things were sort of sequentially telling a story. And then when I was working with those guys, we got hired to make the first mobile video content for video phones that had to come preloaded with content. Charlie’s company had won some sort of contract to make comedy for these phones, both live-action, and animation, but they had tiny budgets. So we were a team of two writers, a designer, an animator, me, and a producer and we had to make all this stuff. I was just supposed to be a runner and then I started editing with them and then we were shooting and then I’d go and have to do some stuff on Nathan Barley and other shows that the production company was doing.

But I ended up having to make a lot of these live-action comedy sketches and be in them—act in them, shoot them, and edit them, and all that kind of stuff—which was cool because it was like going back to college again, but now making films and doing the kind of opening graphics and all that kind of stuff. So it was a great experience. And nobody saw it anyway [laughs]. I was sent on a course to learn how to use PD150. It’s a little Sony mini-TV camera, and that was that. Got really into making stuff and editing it and all that kind of thing. Good fun.

Originally published by Flicks and reproduced with permission. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. ‘Vivarium’ is available digitally from March 27.

#letterboxd #director #interview #jesse eisenberg #imogen poots #lorcan finnegan #vivarium #dystopia

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thegazeofficial-blog · 7 years

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January 2017, Pt. 2

The Gaze: Ep. 2 - Young Thug’s “Wyclef Jean,” Banks’ “Trainwreck,” & Missy Elliott ft. Lamb’s “I’m Better”

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"Hallelujah Money” - Gorillaz

Released: January 19. 2017

Directors: Giorgio Testi & Gorillaz

Hunty: This is supposed to be their anti-Trump video, right? My main problem, is that I’m having a hard time focusing on what he’s saying and correlating that to the imagery behind him.

Kirk: I miss when Gorillaz was a band that was giving us the vibe that it was actual cartoons making this music, and they were the stars of these videos. In recent years these characters are secondary to the music, and it’s primarily other artists that are featured in their videos.

I love the way he’s lit, though. It’s kind of vintage-looking the way they’re playing with the light and shadows. It goes back and forth between projecting on him and being a background projection.

H: I think we’re both big fans of videos where people use projection screens like this and in Rihanna’s “We Found Love” video, for example. You can do a lot with it because you can include any imagery you want, but also have a performance in front of it. The visuals in the background range from dark dystopian stuff, to cartoons, to psychedelia.

K: The beginning clips were darker so when the cartoons come in, they've been staged with a darker tone too.

H: I’m sure it’s saying something about the way we consume media. All this shit just mixed together.

With this book that he’s holding, the black outfit, and his hands shaking, it’s almost like he’s a hellfire and brimstone preacher. It’s very ominous.

K: It feels very apocalyptic. This video feels like he’s giving some sort of sermon-y address to the world and this is projecting in people’s homes telling us “The world is ending.”

H: That’s kind of exactly what’s happening, though.

"Touch” - Little Mix

Released: January 19, 2017

Directors: Director X & Parri$ Goebel

K: I hate it. I think everything about this video is bad. This Lisa Frank folder color scheme of the walls is just killing me.

I think all the looks are terrible and don’t work well as a group. I understand not matching, but there’s also a way to compliment each other.

The camerawork... it’s a lot at once.

H: I love the ripped up sweater with the pendants hanging off of it. That’s the only outfit that I like. I particularly hate the nude bodice over the baggy sweater.

But I agree. Two of them have really dark outfits and the other two are wearing pastels. Meanwhile, the walls have a mix of really bright colors with pastels.

K: Who thought it was a good idea to have nude tones against these bright easter egg colors? I don’t know who did the costume design and art direction for this video, but it just looks strange.

H: It is giving us some sugary-pop spice girls vibes, even if it is a Lisa Frank version.

K: The Spice Girls were never like this. If you think about the “Wannabe”video, at least it works in the sense that it doesn’t look bad, even if it is simple and people only like it because of nostalgia. It’s a simple setting with them showcasing their personalities, and that’s it. Any other girl group could do that and it could be cute.

Everyone now is into these CGI constructed worlds. You have access to literally whatever you want, and THIS is the color scheme you’ve chosen... If you’re going to do it, execute it well.

H: We’re not getting anything conceptually innovative. They have the elements of what a girl group tends to be, but nothing’s executed super well.

I think it maybe says something about the internet generation where if you’re going to drop something, you want to have the most attention-grabbing video. It might be an eye sore, but it has a lot of views. It’s so wrong and extra that it kind of entices you.

K: We’re going to look back in 10 years and be like “Oh, remember when pop groups were all just trying to have the most colorful video, so we’d watch it on Youtube?”

"Pops” - Angel Olsen

Released: January 24, 2017

Directors: Angel Olsen & Jethro Waters

H: After watching “Shut Up Kiss Me” so many times, it’s nice coming back to the OG Angel Olsen aesthetic with these sad slo-mo shots. This obviously isn’t a banger off the album, and we don’t get the in-your-face imagery of the “Shut Up Kiss Me” video, but the song and video are both subdued and pleasing. A decent watch and listen.

K: I like that she’s giving us videos from the rock side and the indie-folk side of the album. She’s like “I can be quiet and introspective and also be a kickass rock chick.” It’s really inspiring coming from a female artist, since people really like to put female artists in a box.

H: This video reminds me of when an artist like Bon Iver or Sufjan Stevens convinces us they are these men from the wilderness when really they’re from Brooklyn or something, but she’s giving us something that is more realistically her world.

K: It’s like she lives in a very normal suburban place that any of us would live in, but the way this video aestheticizes the way she’s experiencing it makes us feel like she’s out in the wilderness by herself, which is a much more honest approach. It’s more of her being isolated in her inner world rather than this actually being the world.

I think it’s very easy to do a video like this and make it seem very trite, but it feels honest and sincere.

It really is a simple marriage between the song and images. It has a maturity to it.

“Kick Jump Twist” - Sylvan Esso

Released: January 24, 2017

Director: Mimi Cave

K: I love that somebody else besides Sia is playing around with modern dance.

H: Right? It’s nice to see a band who’s doing contemporary electronic-pop do something that’s more performance-arty.

I love that it’s a dance video with an unlikely star and in an unlikely setting. This boy is totally killing this dance even though he looks like he was plucked straight off a farm in the backwoods of Kentucky, where guys probably would be shamed for doing something “feminine” like dancing.

K: I like the dance itself. It’s mixing these very feminine and very masculine energies.

This dusty warehouse place looks like an old theatre that hasn’t been open for like 50 years.

H: The way the ground is sand that he can kick up and create this smokey look with the lights and then the lights flashing. It’s kind of like a lot of things we liked from the "Company” video: interesting choreography from the get and subtle aesthetic things that keep it interesting along the way.

K: It reminds me of the “Call Your Girlfriend” video by Robyn, because of the moving camerawork. This has been a long-take up until the cut to the crowd.

Also, the color palette is so good. The beige pants. The light pink wall. His skin tone and light red hair.

I didn’t care for this song, and now I’m very into it.

“Scuse Me” - Lizzo

Released: January 25, 2017

Directors: Quinn Morrow & Asha Maura

H: Lizzo’s literally taking us to church right now, so let’s listen up.

K: There are a lot of interesting correlations to be made between the subject material of the song and the setting of the church. The whole idea that she’s praising her body while in church and even the preacher is telling her to feel herself too. It’s giving you a taste of how spiritual it is for women to love their bodies.

H: And it’s a reversal of what religion normally tells women what to think about their bodies and sexuality.

Even this jungle waterfall scene has a religious feeling in an ancient goddess type of way. She’s like “I’m a badass queen, no matter where I am or what’s going on around me.”

K: I love songs about women feeling themselves metaphorically... or even not. Female masturbation songs are a powerful thing.

H: Yeah, her confidence is inspiring. Her music is like this weird hybrid of pop/soul/R&B/she’s also kind of an MC, but regardless she is selling it.

“I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” - Zayn & Taylor Swift

Released: January 26, 2017

Director: Grant Singer

H: He is so pretty.

K: If he were a gay man, he would be evil.

H: He probably is evil!

K: I think when you’re that rich, good-looking, and successful you have to be evil.

H: He’s smart, though. He’s definitely not the best singer of the group, but he’s found a way to capitalize off of what he’s got, even if it’s mainly his looks, but like that’s what I’d be doing too, girl!

K: You have to be smart to be that famous. Although, I think this video is basic af.

H: It’s got kind of a cool noir-ish vibe to it, but it’s mostly very “We’re sexy people being sad.”

K: They’re too busy trying to be in without pushing forward for anything new. This is basically the stuff underground pop artists have been doing for years now. It’s like a co-opted pop-sheen version of what Sky Ferreira has already done that’s like... no.

H: That’s exactly what this video is. There’s no punch to it. If it’s supposed to be dark and sexy, we’re getting a very light palatable version of that.

(Side note: This video was directed by Grant Singer, who has directed almost all of Sky Ferreira’s music videos.)

“I Love You More Than You Love Yourself” - Austra

Released: January 26, 2017

Director: M Blash

K: It’s got a really 80′s vibe but in a way that’s not super in your face.

H: It’s reminding me a lot of Stranger Things.

K: There’s something playful and campy about the whole thing like how she’s very obviously wearing a wig.

We’re out shopping, but it’s very clear that she’s on a very important mission.

H: These very quick, very close-up flashes of everything are doing a good job of keeping us intrigued but also aestheticizing what’s going on, because I still have no idea what’s happening in this video.

This album is called Future Politics, so I’m wondering what this is saying about modern society.

K: If I had to take a whack at it, I’d say it has the levity comparable to going on a mission to space for women to go and find the perfect look in an attempt to be these perfect image of a woman.

H: It could be addressing how the processes for women to maintain their appearance are often written off as frivolous even though they’re necessary to survival.

Then she doesn’t even use anything in the shopping bags at the dance club, so maybe it’s just trying to destroy this dichotomy between the career-focused female astronaut and the woman who enjoys leisurely shopping.

“Keep Running” - Tei Shi

Released: January 27, 2017

Director: Agostina Gálvez

H: This is giving us Sky’s “Red Lips” meets Madonna’s “Hollywood” meets a Porches video meets Santigold’s “Banshee...”

It’s a perfect representation of the song. It mixes the chill, sexy, sultry R&B vibe with the neon-lit karaoke party vibe that highlights the synthpop sound.

K: It’s so simple, but it’s so well executed. There’s something very effortless about her.

The silk and the shiny floral wallpaper remind me of my grandma’s house, but it’s been sexed up.

H: All of those iridescent materials are super hot right now.

It’s fun that she’s being sexy in a very womanly way, as opposed to a girlish way that’s very prevalent in pop.

K: It’s like “I’m going to be sexy in the way that I want to be.”

H: Literally everything about this is perfect.

"Two Wildly Different Perspectives” - Father John Misty

Released: January 30, 2017

Director: Matthew Daniel SIskin

K: I love that this is shot like a home movie, since a lot of the aesthetics we associate with children on screen are in a home movie style.

H: You don’t realize the kid in the spider-man outfit is a person of color at first, but then he takes his mask off and the situation means something so different. It’s “Two Wildly Different Perspectives,” so I don’t know what I was expecting, but the contrast is really powerful, especially since the white kids are playing with real guns in some scenes.

K: I love that we’re getting these clips of a first-person shooter video game, and then a similarly styled shot using a camera and gun scope in real life.

This video’s amazing. This idea that we’re conditioning our children, especially boys, so young to think that violence and guns are a game.

H: It’s a statement about guns and violence are incorporated into how we raise men. I think it’s powerful to put the visual representation out there of how the typical American boy is socialized, but a lot of people don’t see the negative aspects of it until it’s a person of color, even thought this is how you’re supposed to assimilate to this culture.

K: I think it was really powerful having most of the imagery being of white people playing with guns and then the only imagery of the person of color playing with a gun is isolated to this one scene indoors, and the juxtaposition of those two among our political climate right now. In this video you make associations in ways that aren’t bashing them over your head. It’s subtle and delicate and guides you there.

Also, the music is the perfect backing to it. it adds to what you’re supposed to be watching.

H: There’s a softness to it even though it’s about guns.

K: There’s an innocence to it, and the fact that they do artistic things like the gun flashing in the dark. It hints at kids just having imaginative play and it not having to be about shooting other kids. These kids don’t know what they’re doing with these things.

H: We could just give boys toys that are not guns and not have differing expectations of a person’s relationship to guns based on their race.

“(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” - Sampha

Released: January 31, 2017

Director: Jamie-James Medina

H: I think this scene of him playing the piano is going to be the whole video. That’s kind of the vibe of the song.

K: You know what this giving me vibes of? Peanuts.

*gasps*

I thought this video was one thing/ Now it’s this whole other thing, and I’m like dying.

Is she disintegrating?

I think she’s like his love interest or someone in his life that’s waiting for him, and she’s slowly sort of fading away because he’s so into the piano. That’s why it’s funny that it reminded me of Lucy and Linus from Peanuts.

H: Either way, it’s clearly this commentary on the isolation of focusing on your art and sacrificing relationships for that.

F*ck me up.

To see all of the videos we watched during the second half of January, check out our playlist on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5nKqMtDxQyb6S5CibxaWDTbOt3YRa7Aj

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