Today is what as known in the United States as “Cyber Monday”. It’s the Monday after the day known as “Black Friday”, so named because multiple low-paid retail store employees get trampled to death by rioters shoppers looking for special deals.

Stores, seeing that their terrified employees are being killed, have in the past few years decided to name especially good deals “door busters”, to encourage shoppers to kick in their doors, kill their employees, and then calmly pay for these items. This is an appalling practice and I encourage you to boycott any store advertising “door busters” until they realize that it’s super offensive. It’d be like Facebook branding a sale on ads as “democracy busters”. It’s true, but not something they should be proud of.

On “Cyber Monday”, however, no one is trampled to death. Instead, all shopping is done via the internet. It is called “Cyber Monday” because old people think buying things on the internet is a novelty worthy of a cute name. Millennials just call this “shopping”. Old people also use the word “cyber” to mean things besides having internet sex with a furry. (Note: If you are an old person about to type “What is a furry, please?” into AltaVista, please don’t do it.)

Regardless, this has me thinking about the future on the 1960s and ’70s, when we were promised a gleaming future filled with unimaginable conveniences and shiny robots. One band that lives in this future is Daft Punk.

The group rose to prominence in 2005 after performing at James Murphy’s house and were the perfect choice to do the soundtrack for the sequel to a 1980’s computer movie.

Their song, “Robot Rock” gives us a shocking glympse into our “cyber” future:

First off, let’s get this out of the way. This song is terrible. Don’t people like Daft Punk? Is this what they normally sound like? Kids these days just don’t understand music. In my day…(Editor’s note: 5,000 word rant elided.)

The video opens with some groovy computer graphics.

Then we see some robot men rocking out.

I apologize that these screen shots look terrible but the reason is that video looks terrible. And I’m pretty sure this isn’t a “bad bootleg video taping from MTV” problem, but more of a “this video looks deliberately awful” problem.

Take this for example:

Most of the video looks like this. A bunch of lights flashing so you can’t actually see anything. Is this the future we were promised?

The robot drummer seems to think so.

One thing I love is the this song consists mostly of a single chord so it’s super funny that the guitar player is using an enormous double-necked guitar. He also keeps making these complicated, unnecessary hand movements:

I want to emphasize that no sound is coming out of the guitar while he is doing this.

Then we get some vocoder vocals, “Robot Rock”.

Indeed.

I like this shot of the drummer from above.

The band plays us out.

This is definitely a vision of the future from a time when “the year 2000” referred to the future rather than a pre-9 / 11 time disturbing far back in the past.

The only conclusion I can make from this is that we shouldn’t buy things online anymore. We should steal them.

-PTD

Last time I lectured you on what makes a good video. Today, I forgot all that stuff (probably due to drinking) to bring you a video about people wearing enormous block suits while walking down an infinite hallway.

“I Love It” is not a very good song and I find its lyrical content highly objectionable. That doesn’t really concern me right now, though, because I’m convinced that the song only exists to allow this video to be made. I imagine the three artists showing up to shoot the video only to realize that they hadn’t yet made a song together.

After quickly recording the first thing that popped into their heads, they shot this masterpiece:

Like good science fiction, the video drops you into a fully formed world, not bothering to explain anything. Astute viewers are able to glean a lot from what we’re given, however.

It opens with a poofy-sleeved woman walking down a glowing hallway filled with feature-less, arm-less, and legless female mannequins.

She is followed by two block men.

I love how the woman is shot from below so she looks enormous and the men are shot from above so, especially with the over-sized clothes, they look like tiny kids.

They act like kids, too. They see the woman’s butt (kind of unavoidable since they’re following her).

One of the men has a very playful look about her butt.

I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the look my four-year-old son would have on his face if he realized that he could be looking at someone’s butt.

The woman responds imperiously.

Her hugeness is only emphasized by the additional hugeness of her poofy shirt.

The playful man, knowing he is caught in the act, responds beatifically.

The men start dancing to cover up the awkwardness of the moment.

That is the plot of the video. Obviously, there isn’t much to it, but what’s there is truly a blast. You wouldn’t think that a video consisting entirely of people walking down a hallway would have a plot at all, but they make it work. I think a big part of it is how much fine they were clearly having.

As Gandhi always said, fun makes it run.

-PTD

I realized recently that I’ve been so focused on trying (and failing) to be funny in these blog posts that I’ve lost sight of the blow-hard pedantry that has been a mainstay of this blog for years. I’ve let my fans down and, far (far far far) more importantly, I’ve let myself down. Expect more ill-conceived philosophical rambling and less dick jokes from now on.

What is a music video? Is it an ad for your band? An ad for a retro camera phone? An exercise in homophobic wish fullfillment? While a video can be all those things, I believe that a music video operates on several levels.

1. Something to look at while the music enters your ears.

This is the bare minimum. Without level 1, you would just be listening to music, not watching a music video.

2. Something to reinforce the content of the music.

This frequently takes the form of either showing the group performing or having them act out the content of the song exactly. This is a step up from level 1 because the video goes beyond just being a target for your eyes to being something with actual content.

3. Something to enhance the content of the music.

This is what a good video is all about. It might introduce fully new concepts, shed new light on the contents of the song, or just clarify the point the song is trying to make. If you want a video worth watching, you should be shooting for level 3 content.

Take the song “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” by De La Soul (please). If you didn’t know anything about De La Soul, you might think it’s a typical brag-fest, but the video is here to remind us that it is instead a parody of a typical brag-fest. Take a look:

The video opens with some men screaming.

One is wearing a gas mask, one has headphones on, and one is wearing a hat made out of money.

The money hat is really something.

Then the rapping starts in earnest with an exuberant finger waggle.

The plot, such as it is, is very simple. The song is called Ego Trippin’ and almost all of the rapping is bragging of some sort. But De La Soul is subverting this trope.

Here is one of the members in a Mercedes.

He arrives at “his” house.

There is a super-rad party inside with drinking and beautiful women.

But the celebrity dream is not to be.

This plot structure isn’t much (it doesn’t really take up most of the video), but I like how it works so well with the song. There isn’t a point in the song where they say “we’re only joking”, although it’s pretty clear. In the same way, the video itself doesn’t give any hints at the joke except for these all lowercase messages occasionally flashing across the screen.

There’s even a sort of parallel universe where the members of De La Soul are cool.

The video does have one misstep, a real groaner of a level 2 moment. Here’s what is shown when the singer says “the foot”.

See how it really reinforces the concept of “foot”? Thank god for that.

The rest of the video is pretty great, though. There are these cool shots where the singers have their faces really close to the camera while there appear to be people standing perpendicular to them.

Also, I love how much fun the group seems to be having in the video.

I feel like you can’t fake the fun.

I hope this lecture has enriched your life. And, if you are one of the many music video directors who read this blog closely, taking copious notes, I hope you’ll remember this message and think of me during your next shoot.

-PTD