Many a poor, unwitting friend of mine has been subjected to the above video multiple times due to my obsession with it. I discovered it because for a 6-month period straddling 2011 & 12, it would come up as a suggestion literally every time I watched any music video on YouTube. One day I gave in (remind me never to do that again), and stared, slackjawed, for the next 5 minutes and 33 seconds at what was on my screen. It is the most inexplicable, confusing and disturbing music video I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.
Subsequent to that first time in my office where I think I pulled my assistant in for moral support and she fled, terrified, I've watched this video easily hundreds of times. I still don't have an answer as to what the hell is going on. Just in case you couldn't get past the first few seconds (for which I wouldn't blame you), some choice points include a drag king complete with Fu Manchu, an opening sequence wherein a pale, elbowy girl booty dances in a car's headlights to absolutely no beat while her equally creepy friends watch, and the same girls posing in the desert with swords and morning stars. The elbowy girl, Grimes herself, also spends a lot of time with an albino python in pigtails and a sailor's outfit. It's as if, when coming up with the concept of this video, Grimes and her friends took lots of Extacy and brainstormed for about 5 days, then paid a director to put every single one of their insane ideas into a video. I'm assuming the director was on DMT as well.
The shining highlight (or lowlight, depending on your perspective), however, is Brooke Candy. If you hadn't already guessed by the name, Brooke is the one with the 7' long pink braids and wall-eyed white contacts dressed in a metal body suit (flesh-colored body stocking clearly visible) and stack sneakers.
She flaps around in the desert, sits spread-eagle in the woods, and inappropriately touches Grimes' pigtails throughout the video. She's absolutely amazing, and instantly seals the doom of this video with her odd Mad Max-cum-raver look to make it my pick for weirdest video of the century. In my quest to figure this shit out, a friend and I googled Brooke Candy, and found that she is a rapper(!) from LA who is also a stripper. I refuse to post her videos here because this is a new blog and I can't afford to lose readers. Suffice it to say, it's horrifying.
Finding out who Brooke Candy was didn't explain at all WHY she was in the video, or more to my own point, why this video was even made. When I watched it over and over, I truly felt as though I had come to the end of the Internet. It was the endgame. After months of trying to crack the code, my quest eventually ended with me unsatisfied.
All of the above being said, I truly do love this video, and even Brooke Candy. Somehow the ethereal chillout music goes with the wacky images, and if nothing else, it's piqued the curiosity of many people with similar tastes to mine, though it almost drove me mad. Above all, it introduced us to the very real and un-weird talent of Grimes. Genesis really is a good song, and she has quite a few more, with really good videos. I swear:
She's got really clean, seamless production values and editing, and her elfin voice and ethereal tunes are pretty and meditative. Watching interviews, you can also see in her a quirkiness and punk rock spirit that I attribute to the 90s Montreal music scene, where she hails from. She's won me over in spite of the over-the-top oddball Genesis video. Grimes performed at Coachella last year, so I'm not the only one who has been taken in by her disturbing siren song/video. So have a listen to some of her tracks, try to make it through Genesis, and thank the drug-addled wackos who put the video together, because if their aim was to use confoundedness to highlight a great new talent, I'd say mission accomplished.
No comments:
Post a Comment