Aren’t you bummed that the second Airplane! movie wasn’t called Airplanes!? I’ve been thinking about airplanes because I am going on a flight today. As a people, we are scared of flying. I certainly am. Flying is an extremely dangerous way to travel. The only ways to travel more dangerous are by train, by motorcycle, by bike, by foot, and by car. But that’s it. Oh, boats are more dangerous, too. Did you know that you are more likely to die in a plane crash than to be killed in a shirt factory fire? Chilling.

Car-related side note: In Chicago after a snow, it is traditional for people save their precious parking spot by blocking it off with lawn furniture. People who are new to Chicago get really excited about this tradition and decide to partake of it immediately. They don’t understand the rules, though. In case you are one of these people let me lay it down for you and see if you can pick it up.
1. You must have shoveled the spot out. This is the most important! If all you did was block some of the falling snow with your car, you may not save your spot.
2. You only get to save it for a day. Maybe two, but probably not. Shoveling out a spot once does not reserve it for the whole winter.
3. People are allowed to steal your lawn furniture. Sorry, it’s just a fact of life.
I hope these rules allow you to fully enjoy dangerously driving around on slippery roads at 10 miles an hour over the speed limit!

Okay, back on track. So, I know deep down that flying isn’t dangerous especially compared to driving. I’m still frightened about it. This Burt Reynolds quote really explains it, “My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave.” When you are in an airplane, there is nowhere for you to go. You can be in Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite situation: You know something bad is going to happen and there is nothing you can do about it. Now, I know I should be approximately 400 times more scared when I’m riding in a car, but I’m not. I imagine that I could just hup out the window at 70 miles an hour and roll to safety. This is why I always recommend practicing jumping out of speeding cars on the freeway. You won’t regret it.

Anyways, this trapped feeling shows up in music videos. Did you know that Another Flavor is a blog about music videos? And that on Twosday we talk about two videos with something in common? Well, now you do. You’re welcome.

Today we’ll be looking at the video for Britney Spears’s Toxic and Foo Fighters’ Learn to Fly. Let’s start with Toxic.

First off, isn’t Toxic a great song? It really is.

Spears is addicted to her man. She needs him. But she’s on a plane because she is a flight attendant from 1960s space:

So what can she do? She’s gotta grab some random dude and drag him into the bathroom.

She has no choice. She’s trapped. That’s what happens when you get on an airplane.

Unlike Spears’s harrowing story of unfulfilled sexual desire, Foo Fighters warn us of the dangers of drinking non-alcoholic beverages in their video for Learn to Fly.

I’m not sure how I feel about this video. I’m not a huge fan of men dressed as women in fat suits.

Disgusting. Fat people are not inherently funny! Neither is cross dressing!

This video does show the trapped feeling of being on a plane well, though. Almost everyone drinks drugged coffee.

This leaves the alcohol-only members of Foo Fighters to save the day. Normally, you’d be able to call for experts in a disaster situation, but when you are in a plane you only have the people you took off with. This is what is so terrifying. Just look at Lost! Imagine having to spend 6 seasons with whoever happened to be on a plane with you! Crazy.

If I don’t die in a fiery wreck, I’ll be back tomorrow with more music video goodness!

-PTD

Recently I’ve been thinking. My doctor told me my medication would prevent this, but apparently I haven’t been taking enough. What have I been thinking about? The past. Specifically when I was in college. I think everyone feels this way, but I think a lot of the world has changed during my life. I think this pegs me as some sort of curmudgeon, retrogrouch, or premature old person, but maybe I am.

This new year’s eve I was taking a bus and there was a group of people on that bus. Since they were audibly excited about going to a bar I have to assume that they were all 21 or younger. Everything they said made me want to ride my Rascal back there and tell them to get off my lawn. I hate it when people who are young (like me) say they are old, but I guess we all hate ourselves sometimes.

Anyways, these are the changes I’ve been thinking about, and all of them have to do with electronics:

1. When I left for college, cell phones were a thing that a few people had. Suddenly, though, everyone had them. This meant that it was no longer possible to make specific plans with people because they would just “call you when I get there”. Gone were the days of meeting in front of the statue of Nixon at 7:25 AM.

2. During college I sent exactly 0 text messages and received about 3 of them. While I was still in college younger kids showed up who texted all the time. You would be talking to them and they would be texting. They would walk out of a class and immediately text someone. Those phones that you turned sideways to access a keyboard were really popular. Who were they texting and what were they texting about? I still have no idea.

Man, I’m terrible. I recently told my aunt that I was thinking I should get on Twitter but didn’t really understand it. When did this happen to me? Am I going to start complaining about kids who don’t pull their pants up?

3. Everyone started buying Ipods. Before this everyone had to use either Disc- or Walk-men (mans?) using either regular CDs/tapes they bought from a store or homemade mixes. You were forced to listen to an album or consciously create a set of songs that function like a homemade album where the songs were supposed to be listened to in a certain order. Because Ipods can hold a bunch of songs pretty much everybody bought one and started listening to their entire music collection on shuffle at all times.

None of these are particularly bad things. They are just changes. I don’t think any of them ruined America or even a different country that wasn’t already ruined.

That third change, though, had a big affect on music. Before you would choose what music to listen to. Now you just hit shuffle and if something comes on that you don’t like you go to the next randomly chosen song. Also, people started to listen to music more. You might just be walking to the store, but you’d listen to music at the same time. This meant that we weren’t so much listening to music as creating a soundtrack to our lives. The music we wanted to hear was no longer the best to listen to, but the best reflection of whatever we were doing or whatever emotional state we were in.

It’s not a surprise that shoe gaze had a resurgence in popularity at this time. Shoe gaze is the perfect soundtrack for a hungover college student walking to class. Shoe gaze is brutally boring, of course, and if you sit down and try to listen to it while doing nothing else you will kill yourself after 3 minutes. That doesn’t matter anymore because of Ipods. Musicians can create what is essentially background music and know that people will enjoy listening to it while walking around.

(Note: I understand that this sounds extremely judgmental and that I am basically saying that the type of music I like is the real deal and type of music other people like is bullshit. Oh well. I’m under the impression that bloggers were supposed to be dicks all the time, so that’s what I’m doing.)

What does any of this have to do with music videos? Isn’t Another Flavor a music video blog? Yes! One of the reasons I love music videos is that it matches well with how I prefer to listen to music. I like to just sit there and listen to the music. Music videos force you to pretty much do that because you have to listen to the music and look at the video. Your eye and ear senses are fully engaged. I guess you could distract yourself by touching animal fur and then trying to guess the animal (do NOT attempt this with live bears), but most people wouldn’t do that. You just sit there and watch the music video.

This actually creates a problem for those musicians who specialize in this background-type music. How do you make a music video for a song that isn’t supposed to be interesting by itself? Let’s find out.

Sea of Knives by Brice Woodall (who I believe is from Chicago):

First off, I do not want to say this song is bad. It really isn’t. It just isn’t my style. I feel like the chorus is too similar to the verse and the vocals are so processed that you can’t hear any of the words. That’s fine, though, because the song is supposed to make me feel a certain way. As a result, the visuals in the video need to provide more content than a video normally needs to. You can’t just follow the story of the song because the song floats along with very little content. In this case, a whole narrative is concocted:

There is a prison on an island.

In said prison there are some prisoners.

Aren’t their outfits a delight? They are wearing old timey prison stripes and hobo hats. The man has a suspiciously well-kempt beard.

They try to escape! They crawl through the barbed wire.

Incidentally, “razor wire” is pretty much the only recognizable phrase in the song. From what I call tell the first line of the chorus is, “We can mingle with the crowd,” but that is only after watching the video 5 times.

Since the prison is on an island they have to swim for freedom.

A man in a biplane drops bombs at them.

They land in paradise.

This freedom might actually be death because it seems a bit too ideal. Maybe this song is about how the only freedom we can ever find comes from leaving this life. Maybe the guy who made the video just really likes sunflowers.

This narrative is actually kind of perfect. It is easy to make a music video’s story too confusing (just check out this video by Camera Obscura) or too complex. This story is very clear and is the right size for the length of the song. Also, using animation plus people in front of green screens lets this video be mildly ambitious with a presumably small budget. The video also looks very good as a whole.

This video does exactly what a video should do, which is make me like the song more than I would without the video. Awesome.

Join me tomorrow for another edition of Twosday here on Another Flavor!

-PTD

Welcome to another edition of Free-for-all Friday here on Another Flavor! Friday is the day I let my mind (and eyes) wander to any subject (or open window) I choose.

I used to be a boy scout. In the boy scouts I won the Zero Hero award twice. This reward is very easy to earn. All you need to do is sleep outside when it is below zero degrees. In case you are reading this from a foreign (i.e. non- US, i.e. bad) location, yes, I mean below zero degrees Fahrenheit. So, based on my handy converter that is about -18 degrees Celsius, 255 degrees Kelvin, or 42 degrees Canadian. You could say I have an affinity for winter weather. I don’t think it’s true, but you could say it. No one is stopping you.

Anyway, I mention this because I live in Chicago and due to tropical storm Hercules we have been having some very wintry weather. I would estimate that, since Wednesday, we have received 10 inches of snow. For those of you not familiar with winter or snow, that isn’t hyperbole. Saying we got 58 inches of snow is hyperbole. Also, wouldn’t it be great if they changed the name of the Super Bowl to the Hyper Bowl? Write your congress-person to let them know.

It hasn’t been crazy cold (I believe it is 9 degrees right now. The real cold is coming Monday where the high is supposed to be -8 degrees.) but there is just so much snow! Why do I mention all this? Because I hate it! Snow is such a drag. I can deal with an inch or two, but this amount of snow has a real psychological effect on me. I think it affects all of us.

We can see these effects in music videos. Another Flavor is a blog about music videos! This is great!

Snow can cloud our judgment. (It also apparently makes me think that there should be an “e” between the “g” and “m” in judgment, but shouldn’t there be?) Look at this video for We Got Snow:

Leah Daniels apparently thinks of herself as a white Zooey Deschanel. She doesn’t have such a deep, distinctive voice though. She also has picked a real clunker to perform. Why, when doing old timey jazz stuff, does it seem appropriate to dress in old fashioned clothing? Do classical musicians wear powdered wigs? Do baroque harpsichordists poop dangerously close to their own drinking water supply? If not, then why do people doing 1920s-style music wear 1920s-style clothes?

Also, I don’t find this song very interesting. Do you think the director kept telling the background musicians to pretend to be happy and excited? They aren’t very good actors. I think their brains have all been addled by snow. Even to the point where they aren’t wearing particularly warm clothing. Crazy.

Snow can also make you lazy. I am reluctant to go outside unless absolutely necessary. Many people put off chores, and sometimes don’t even go into work just because of snow. The Red Hot Chili Peppers got extremely lazy when it came to their song Snow (Hey Oh):

It seems like this video just consists of some rehearsal/sound check shots, a few shots of a single live performance, and many shots of death row prison inmates just before their executions.

Those poor bastards.

This video seems to have been made entirely incidentally. I guess it shows the current (when I say current read it as 2006) attitude towards music videos. Apparently they aren’t very important and don’t need to be remotely interesting. If you are feeling lazy you can just hire a couple of college kids to film you for a day and edit it into a music video. The results just make me angry. Snow!

Also, did you know that song was called snow? I didn’t. I am amazed that Red Hot Chili Peppers had a repopularitying over 10 years after their original popularityness. It seems like every time John Frusciante is their guitar player they are super popular and every time their guitar player is Dave Navarro or some dead guy they have no hits. They need to do everything they can to keep that guy around. Otherwise they are just lazy people with bad songs. That’s a recipe for Trouble (yes, with a capital “T” that rhymes with “p” that stands for “pool”).

Finally, snow can make us extremely racist. Just ask a man so racist that he named himself Snow. Here’s his monster hit from his album hilariously named “12 Inches of Snow”:

There is nothing racist about being a white person playing reggae. Seriously, go for it! Be the second coming of UB40 for all I care. The problem comes from his use of the Jamacain accent/patois. This is just linguistic black face. Why would this ever be considered acceptable? This song was big in 1993! Just 21 years ago! Unbelievable.

On a non-snow-related, but black-face-related side note, check this out:

Specifically, this:

Man, what is wrong with people? Why can’t people just be themselves instead of pretending to be black, no matter how inherently hilarious all black people are? Terrible.

I’ll see you next week with more music video fun and hopefully less racism here on Another Flavor!

-PTD