Thank goodness for YouTube and other sites featuring home-spun videos juxtaposed with found, stolen, and forgotten 'professional' clips. The weaving together of do-it-yourself aesthetics, fandom, and reverence for the weird. Among other by-products of YouTube, a rennaisance in my own appreciation for the artform of the music video. I haven't really kept up with the form since junior high. Of course in the early and mid-1980s MTV created (much like YouTube is doing right now) another artistic moment characterized by bizarre juxtaposition: epic storytelling (Duran Duran), avant garde iconography (Devo), on-the-cheap found clips (Donnie Iris), kitsch (Toni Basil or ZZ Top), and the triumph of image for its own sake (Talking Heads).
Who knows what the by-products of YouTube will be? Who knows what musical movements, fads, fashions, logics, poetics, and rhetorics will come about as kids grow up with YouTube? Already my nieces and nephews have filmed their own series of horror films (Insanity Man--sorry, no link, not yet available online). In some ways, the descendents of backyard plays for the neighborhood, but more than that too.
Anyway, that's all set-up for a link to a great new video from one of my favorite bands, the great and eclectic Scottish twee-pop collective, Belle&Sebastian. The song is White Collar Boy. The music takes what Pulp did in the 90s with working-class narrative (a la Common People) and applies the formula to middle-class professionalism. Part Sex Lies and Videotape, part Bridget Jones, part The Office. A follow-up to the white-collar sequence begun on their last album (with songs like "Step Into My Office Baby"). The video itself incorporates slapstick, sexual politics, and, of course, the bizarre. Enjoy.
1 comment:
so can i assume that you like belle and sebastian?
i totally dig the tag line though, i love that song
Post a Comment