Hello and welcome to Satorial Sursday here on Another Flavor! Every Sursday (that’s the day Norse people with a reverse lisp named after Sor, god of sunder) we will take a look at an individual in a music video and spend a bit talking about their clothing. These posts will generally be pretty quick, but I think it’s important to be able to write about extraordinary clothing in an otherwise unremarkable video.

Today we’ll be looking at the singer from this video, What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes:

First off, two notes about this song. I don’t like the name of it. I understand that the hook, “What’s going on?” and the title of the song, “What’s up?” mean essentially the same thing, but I don’t think it makes sense to name the song something similar to what is sung in the song. It makes more sense to just use lyrics from the song to name it. Take it from Kid Rock who named a song Bawitdaba, even though those are just nonsense syllables. He sings “Batwitdaba” in the song so that is what he named it. If you want to have a cool name that doesn’t just use lyrics from the song it should be totally different like Counting Blue Cars by Dishwalla. I feel like this song title is in some sort of song titling uncanny valley and it makes me uncomfortable.

Second, the name of the band is also unpleasant to me. The name 4 Non Blondes implies that the members of the band aren’t like them , but are intelligent and worth knowing. I don’t like this kind of stereotyping. Also, I think the bass player of the band is blonde so it isn’t even accurate. The bass player looks super-stereotypically lesbian, though, so does that cancel it out? Is it a rule that lesbians can’t be blonde regardless of their hair color?

Okay, so here is the picture of the singer we’ll be looking at:

The bass player I mentioned earlier appears on the right, but we’re just worried about the singer right now.

Three things jump out at us, the dreadlocks, the goggles, and the hat.

The dreadlocks are just a nineties thing, I think. Didn’t everyone have white person dreads back then? I think even black people were jumping on the white dreads bandwagon. It’s just a thing. Nothing to worry about.

Now, the hat. The only other musician I can think of who wore a hat like that (I’m talking rock musician, I believe in the twenties literally everyone was always wearing a top hat) is Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Based on that information one possibility is that, by aping a prominent cock-rock artist, the singer is trying to refer to and reject the heavy metal, male-dominated world view. The other possibility is that the singer, just like Slash, is going bald and is trying to hide it with fashion.

The most intriguing part of her whole get up are the goggles. The goggles show her affinity for steampunk, but she isn’t really wearing them per se. They are on her hat. There’s actually a different part of the video where she is wearing a different hat with a different set of goggles. It’s crazy. So the goggles are very important. I can understand not wanting to cover up most of your face with goggles, but I’d like to think they aren’t just for fashion. I think we have to conclude that either there are extremely sensitive eyes on her top hat or she has two sets of eyes, one set being hidden by these goggles. I think the second possibility is more likely since the goggles are necessary even with a different hat.

So what does this mean for us? Does it mean that the name 4 Non Blondes does not refer to the band members’ hair color, but to the color of the singer’s four eyes? Is the singer an alien disguised to live among us? Have I just made the most important discovery in the history of humans?

Probably.

-PTD

How can you show rebelliousness in a music video? It isn’t easy, as I discussed on Monday. Most of the things you can do end up seeming sad and desperate. Just take a look at these pictures from the video for Fat Lip by Sum 41:

They hired someone to pretend to be a cop and then had someone pretend to not care about the cop’s authority. Eventually he shows the cop his butt.

This isn’t rebellious at all, it is rebellion theater. Hiring a cop just to show him your butt is low. On a side note, I don’t think white people, regardless of the number of ill-conceived facial piercings or neck tattoos, really get oppressed by the police so this kind of display is in bad taste. You’d be better served trying to prevent a cop from killing a black person because they can do so with impunity.

Anyways, I think the best way to be rebellious is to indicate that you know you are not a true rebel. Nirvana wanted to be popular. They made music videos, appeared on MTV, and did magazine interviews. They did everything they could to become one of the biggest bands in the world. (I think it is good to remember when thinking about Nirvana that Guns N’ Roses, a ridiculous and stupid 1980s-style metal band, was simultaneously extremely popular. Culture doesn’t magically shift. It only seems to in retrospect.) At the same time, though, Nirvana thought that the whole system is bullshit and anyone who plays into it (including themselves) are like dancing monkeys.

We get to see both of those sides to the band in this video for In Bloom:

The video opens with a Ed Sullivan-type TV host introducing them.

He calls Nirvana (which he mispronounces, I love it) “thoroughly all right and decent guys.” I think this is pushing the concept a bit into the realm of the painfully obvious, but subtlety isn’t always the name of the game. The name of the game is sometimes Risk or Monopoly. Scrabble, too. That’s a good one.

We see the band dressed in their ridiculous suits playing in front of a bizarre sultan’s palace cut-out. The drummer is wearing a hilarious blonde wig.

Here Nirvana is in their non-rebellious, fame-seeking mode. They play along in a carefree manner to appeal to the masses. This coincides with the lyrics for the chorus, “He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs… But he don’t know what it means.” People respond to the catchy surface of Nirvana, and the band must push that.

But the band simultaneously thinks that their music, and the attempt to publicize it, is corrupt.

This is the face of a monster.

Now we get to see the other side of Nirvana. They are all wearing dresses and moving freely across the stage rather than staying in position for easier close-ups. Their hair is unkempt with the drummer losing his blonde wig. He also has a cymbal on his head.

This is the face the band would prefer to present to the world. Without the other, clean-cut face, though, no one would get to see the band’s wild side. They are both necessary. Also, I’m not sure how subversive wearing a dress really is, but I think we’re supposed to find it subversive.

I do love how the drummer in the crazy shots holds up his snare drum while playing it. Did the stand get kicked away? Maybe he just needs to hold it next to his head to hear it better.

The shots switch back and forth between the straight and wild versions of Nirvana. Once the guitar solo starts we start to see a raw, sexualized version of the band.

The bass player uses the old instrument-as-penis move.

The bass player and guitar player then rub their instruments together.

Is this gender bending? Homosexuality? An excellent idea for a Christmas card?

The singer then grabs his crotch while singing.

All of these moves are very much in the 1980s metal band vein. I think you could probably find a video where this exact sequence of penises and crotch- grabbing happens in a video by Great White or a similar group. I think it is here that the dresses really start working for them. They are making fun of the sex obsessed groups who seem to brandish their penises like clubs. Instead, Nirvana place themselves in a woman’s clothing to show how ridiculous this posturing really is.

The band destroys their instruments. At the end they appear in the ruins but in their clean-cut clothing. The Ed Sullivan stand-in calls them, “nice, decent, clean cut men.” He says “they will be really big stars.”

And they were. I think this video does show a little bit of rebellion. By not ignoring the ways they are not rebellious, we are able to see the ways they are. The video plays this theme pretty hard, probably too hard. Also, the first 2 minutes of the video are brutally boring. We get to see something we don’t always see in videos, though, so I’m thankful for that.

Get ready for tomorrow when we bring you the first edition of Satorial Sursday on Another Flavor!

-PTD

Welcome to Twosday on Another Flavor! Twosday is when we compare two music videos with something in common.

Today we’ll be glancing at two videos about mechanization. As machines become part of our lives, how does that affect us as people?

First, Cars by Gary Numan:

In cars, Numan states that the only way to live is in cars. His appearance is cold and unemotional.

You imagine he would look the same waiting in line to buy milk, having sex, or killing someone. If you said, “Nice day,” to him he would look at the sky to ascertain whether the day was nice or not. The dude has no mercy.

When you see his band it is a bunch of identical dudes playing identical synthesizers.

I love the one guy who plays the hand clap noise. He occasionally just slams on the synth.

Gary Numan becomes the machine. That is his response to mechanization. What about Yello? Check out the video for Bostitch:

Okay, so first off this video is probably one of the best ever made. The guy in the video? He is actually an eccentric German millionaire. If I love anything, it is art made by eccentric German millionaires. If I love two things it is art made by eccentric German millionaires and my wife.

Yello do not become the machine, although they love machines. The words at the beginning are, “Standing at the machine everyday for all my life. I’m used to do it and I need it. It’s the only thing I want. It’s just a rush, push, cash.” The awkwardness of “I’m used to do it,” makes me happy. German millionaires don’t need to speak English well.

Rather than cold and unemotional, the man in the video is decidedly un- machine-like.

That hat indicates that he is “just folks”, not an elitist engineer or a machine. No machine would combine that hat with a shirt, tie, and suspenders. Few people would, either, but that is beside the point.

Rather than being accompanied by a band, the music we hear in the video remains a mystery. We have no idea how it is made, on what instruments or by how many people. The only other person who appears is this woman who is clearly also a mystery:

Her question mark hair is amazing, though.

Eventually the man rebels against the machination of his life. “Everybody needs somebody sometimes,” he shouts.

“N’est-ce pas?” he then asks, slyly.

The sheer insanity that went in to the making of this song and video is unbelievable. Yello was on Ralph Records which is the record label owned by The Residents. They are the weirdos pictured here:

That explains some of it, but I don’t think the video is weirdness for weirdness’s sake. Yello envisions a man who needs to work at a machine, but he also needs somebody. His time with a machine has left him socially inept, not even aware of what clothing normal humans wear. He still needs someone, though. Is it a woman? He no longer knows. It’s haunting, really.

I know I’ll be thinking of this man always.

I think there is something wrong with me, though, because I want to be just like him. Man, eccentric German millionaires.

I hope you enjoyed this Twosday. I’ll see you tomorrow with a post about a single video from the early 1990s.

-PTD