The Literary Merit of Music Videos

I have not read anything or watched anything of extreme literary merit lately. We were going to rent a movie this weekend, but that didn't work out. I didn't watch TV yesterday when I was out because my mother had the weather channel on the whole day. But, I did watch four music videos because I do love music, and I thought three of them in particular were quite good.

I usually go on BBC's Radio 1 to see the top charts of music. This is usually the way I get my music. Lately, things have been lax in the music department on Radio 1's charts but there have recently been some good new songs. 


The first song I listened to was Endorphins by Sub Focus. The music video featured a dystopian society where music was outlawed. There were various shots of a SWAT team coming in a taking people's sources of music. The first was a group of people dancing to a stereo system, their faces and movements similar to those of various protest movements, especially the kind of psychedelic feel of the hippie movement in the late 60s. The SWAT team was also all white men, and there were mostly black and asian protesters. I don't know if that was a conscious decision to provide similarities between music movements in the sixties with Civil Rights movements, taking music, a love of all human beings and comparing it to rights that all human beings should be able to enjoy that are taken away. The second shot was two people sitting under a blanket tent, a mother and a daughter, the mother giving the daughter an ipod to listen to. The SWAT team came in, took the iPod and arrested the woman and daughter. The blanket tent simulated childhood, and perhaps the way oppression affects childhood and how that suppression travels through the psych later on in life. The third shot is of two elderly people dancing to their gramophone. The SWAT team comes in and breaks the gramophone and arrests the couple. This describes the taking away of tradition; the fact that music has been an underlying part of human beings since the beginning of time and the fact that this SWAT is taking it away is appalling. At the end of the music video the SWAT is shown listening to a confiscated stereo. This says the way humans in oppressive societies are held to impossible standards that they must enjoy themselves. It also says that everyone deserves the same rights, whether it be universal music, or other rights. Perhaps this is a subtle commentary about current civil rights movements, as all humans have a common love for music, music is a medium that bridges gaps and makes people understand each other.

Endorphins: People without music

The second video was Easy by Porter Robinson. It was a commentary on pop culture, whether specifically Japan's pop culture is debatable. The heroine was receiving a call from her manager again and again while looking at a picture of a mountain and cherry blossoms, perhaps Mount Fuji or some other mountain in Japan. This describes the decline in the natural environment and the way things once were with increased technology, in which Japan leads. She went out onto the balcony of her apartment and saw herself plastered on countless advertisements around the city (citing the obsession with beauty and the overtake of corporate monopolies, the drop in diversity across the planet with increased communication and corporations reaching into every part of our lives) and finally threw her phone over the edge, went out of her high rise apartment, got on her motorcycle, left a bomb in the middle of the city, and detonated it. The city was filled with blinding light and then the film took on a strange, 'spirit' world feel with the lines made of meshed color and everything else white. This faded out to the girl in the environment of the picture she was viewing at the beginning of the video, describing her freedom. Perhaps the bombed city will return to its natural environment and things will return to the way they were. The song was talking about how 'loving you is easy', so perhaps it's commenting on how taken the human race is with technology, beauty, and such things that were described in the beginning environment of the movie. Perhaps the 'heroine' felt the only way to erase this 'love' was to blow it to smithereens.

Easy: Heroine riding through Neo Tokyo on motorcycle

The third video was So Good to Me by Chris Malinchak. In it, a girl was looking for her pet giraffe which had gotten away and was playing hide and seek. the film hid the fact that she was looking for a giraffe, making the viewer surprised when the giraffe snuck up on the little girl in the end and nuzzled her face. The two friends then played hide and seek. The song has a strange feel to it, between fantasy, childish imagination, and the adult world that children live in. Most likely set in South Africa, it describes how friends can be found in the most unconventional places, and sometimes the awkward, unlikely friends are the best. Also, the girl was tiny and the giraffe was huge. This difference in size also describes how friends can be extremely different from each other. The girl might have been judged for her pet giraffe, but "all the skies are blue as long as you love me", as the song said. The giraffe was also adorable, and the video was very cute and smart. The song is also very low key and sweet.

So Good to Me: Girl and her pet giraffe

I will attempt to put all three music videos below for your viewing pleasure. I have analyzed the crap out of these videos, so you will all be grossly over thinking them the next time you watch them. Wait, it's not showing up on the youtube thing. I will put the links instead.

Endorphins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3CYKXBEtf0

Easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at3FPJaAwoY

So Good To Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrMl32cuC2A

A Look At the End Of Celluloid (Updated with Fantabulous Pictures)

We were viewing a documentary on the different types of film in the 90's, at the end of celluloid. The 90's heralded in the beginning of the digital age for film, and this lost the more organic style of filming that has dominated from the beginning of film history.

Through the Olive Trees

The story began with an Iranian director who was trying to create the most organic, realistic film experience by eliminating such things as lighting, and most interestingly, the director. In his first film, he was filming the life of a young boy. A while after the movie was filmed there was a natural disaster in the area. He went back to find the little boy and instead encountered a man who interested him and filmed him. During the shooting of this film, the director fell in love with an actress in the film but was rejected. His next film was about that experience, and during the filming he encountered the young boy from the first film all grown up. This strange coincidence literally brings around the cycle of the films. The Iranian films I have seen have always been very quiet and take a lot from real life experiences. Little or no music is used, only natural sounds are heard. It seems that the Iranian culture supports less of a 'story' and more of a look into life.                                                                                                                          

The Ring

The next category was the Japanese film makers who in the 90's were busy making horror films that capitalizes on their fear of technology and women (haha). The director of The Ring was heavily influenced by an old Japanese film from the 30's about a female ghost. I cannot find the name of this film ANYWHERE, but I know it had Monogatari in it and it was in black and white.                                                       

La Haine

The most interesting part by far was the French film portion. The film stated at the beginning that France was one of the original origins of film. They discussed a few films, L'Haine and Beau Travail. L'Haine is the story of three ethnically diverse boy living in the French projects. It was filmed without music and in black and white to represent the bleakness of city life and the quietness of the story of the three seemingly faceless boys who were the protagonists of the story.

Beau Travail

It reminded me of the grey imagery through The Road and how it represented a dying road. In L'Haine, it was the opposite. The grey was ironic to the amount of life in the city, demonstrating the degradation people outside the inner city see versus the life within it. Beau Travail was a reimagining of Billy Bud by Herman Mellville set in Djibouti in a French Foreign Legion outpost. A new recruit enters and immediately makes the head officer jeleous. In the end of the film there is a beautiful scene implying impending suicide. The last shot of the scene was a close up of a pulsating vein in the man's arm representing how precious life is. The last scene of the movie was a metaphorical dance of the man's last dreams before he died. The whole documentary was very interesting and captured perfectly the bittersweet ending of celluloid, the living camera, and the beginning of the digital age of camera.

Below are clips from the movies, tried to upload them but oddly enough they would not come up when I tried uploading them from youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okQJPUTQMqA (La Haine)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKDWk3dgjDs (Beau Travail)