“Always open with a quote.”

-Oscar Wilde

Danzig knows this lesson well. Check check it:

As the name suggests, this is a very psychological video. There are multiple dualities present: light and dark, mother and father, virgin and whore, hooded sweatshirts and sleevelessness. The video takes place in our protagonists mind as he struggles between good and evil.

It is amazing how this video can do so much with so little. The background is totally black so all you see is the actors and the occasional prop. This lets you focus on how magnetic Danzig is. You get occasional glimpses of the rest of his band’s hair flying around but this is clearly all about Danzig. Here he is half in the light and half in the darkness as he ponders the inner world of the mother.

Then: FATHER!

He opens his eyes as he enters the external world of the father. He also sounds and looks increasingly angry. Is he angry at his father? Did he get a bicycle instead of a car on his 16th birthday? Maybe nothing that bad, but he is so angry that he decides to embrace the darkness:

He is lit from below in the standard ghost story manner. You can imagine him saying, “The hooked hand called from inside the house saying that she died three years ago on this very night!!!” His features take on a hellish expression as the shadow of his nose gives him a reverse devil lock.

Having fully turned to evil, Danzig decides to menace some women.

So menacing. He chooses to menace two different women. He doesn’t want to feel tied down at this point in his life.

First we have this woman:

Look how menaced she is. She clearly represents a good woman who has not been corrupted by the world, like Jane Eyre.

Then Danzig menaces this woman:

She apparently likes being menaced, like Gene Simmons’s wife Shannon Tweed. She represents the fallen woman. This means that, unlike a good woman, she probably has opinions and uses a diva cup instead of tampons.

Now begins the danse macabre in the form of an alluring guitar solo. You can hear the musical allusions to Saint- Saëns, Deep Purple, and “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

A devil performs a perverted baptism:

Based on the baptee’s nipple area, I’d say she was totally nude. And why does the devil have long fingers? The better to touch your head with, my nude darling. Ok, this is getting crazy!

Shannon finds this very groovy and does a sexy dance:

Meanwhile, Jane needs some more convincing in the form of significant glances.

Clearly, Jane is still not convinced. Danzig finds her fear intriguing. He suspects that she is playing hard to get. There is only one solution: to reveal himself in his full glory:

This is just like the end of The Sixth Sense. He’s been wearing a hoodie with the sleeves cut off the entire time! And look at those muscles! It’s always been my dream to some day look good enough to rock this look. I’d probably have to quit my job at that point because I would be unwilling to wear any non-cut-off-hoodie clothing. Hold onto your seats and keep a fresh pair of pants nearby, though, because this is only the second-most-shocking revelation of the video.

Jane is placed on an altar for some sort of ritual:

Danzig is accompanied by his fabulous assistant, Shannon. He produces a chicken from thin air! I’ve seen this done with doves, but to my knowledge this is a first in flight of hand.

THEN HE FUCKING RIPS THE CHICKEN IN HALF! HOLY SHIT! BLOOD GETS EVERYWHERE!

This is just like the second half of Roadhouse where you think you’re having a good time and then Patrick Swayze rips a dude’s throat out. Both the chicken and the blood come from nowhere. I don’t know if it is possible for a normal person to just rip a chicken in half but Danzig has really beefy arms. I was so shocked by this event that I had to watch the video about 100 times before I noticed what happens next.

Now Shannon is on the altar, not Jane! The ritual somehow caused the two to switch places.

Now Jane is corrupted!

So what does this mean? I suspect nothing. But whoa.

-PTD

Do you like grunge? Of course you do. It’s awesome. Nirvana. Bush. Mother Love Bone? What was so great about all (okay, some) of these bands? They were just like us. We all wore flannel, had depression, and were millionaires.

They had the veneer of being different from all of those 80’s hair metal bands. Guess who else isn’t like stuck up celebrities? Lorde:

She knows exactly what normal people do. They live in featureless, colorless apartments with the curtains eternally closed.

Note: this video features two young men apparently living alone. Two young men living alone have never put up curtains, ever. This leads me to believe that the “normal” people depicted in this video killed an elderly couple in a home- invasion-style robbery and have been living in their murder victims’ home ever since. Is that what Lorde means by “a different kind of buzz”?

They watch TV:

They apparently don’t pay the cable bill and can’t get their shit together to buy a digital converter box. Just like murderers.

Normal people stare at basketball hoops:

Do you know what is like basketball? Murder. Just ask an expert.

They beat the shit out of each other until they are spitting blood:

I actually think this might be pretty normal.

Finally, they drown themselves in a pool. They leave no note.

Okay, so maybe Lorde doesn’t know that much about normal people. She does, however, know a few things about making a good music video. First of all, there’s this:

Why don’t more people include the name of their band and the name of the song in the video? Don’t they know that no one is watching their video on MTV with all the info in the bottom corner? A music video is an [ad](/posts/ant-music- perfect-ad/) so you should make it clear what your ad is for!

Also, a few days ago I mentioned a video where the band was not moving and I hated it. Not this time. Pretty much every time Lorde is on screen she looks like this:

This works perfectly for this song. I would describe the song as “chill” if everyone I went to college with didn’t use that word until I lost all feeling in my soul. Instead, I’ll say that the song is low energy, but in a good way. No excitement mismatch here.

I’m not a big fan of how the lip syncing works in this video, though. The song is very much divorced from a live performance. It uses approximately 10,000 vocal overdubs all by the same person, and then a tiny bit of drums, so trying to sing in the video doesn’t really work. She ends up picking lines to sing seemingly at random while standing there awkwardly at other times.

Why not just have her as one of the normal people murdering people in the video and have no lip syncing whatsoever? Who said you needed lip syncing in a music video? Do you know who didn’t lip sync? Jesus! I think that makes my point.

But that’s just nitpicking. Lorde is a very relaxed person who thinks the average person is a train riding murderer. I approve of that.

-PTD

If there’s one thing I love, it’s ridiculous hair. The kind of hair that you’re ashamed of looking back, even if “looking back” means looking at pictures of yourself from two months ago. You know what I’m talking about:

Specifically this:

I think it is obvious how awesome this guy’s hair is. I couldn’t imagine having the guts to even leave the house looking like that, and here he is rocking that ‘do in a music video. Sploosh.

So what is this video’s deal, anyway? It is actually very similar to the live without an audience format I [wrote about yesterday](/posts/excitement- mismatch-with-jet-and-vines/). Except, they add a new wrinkle: cavorting around like a group of morons. The idea is that watching the video is like hanging out with the band. This is what they do every day!

Playing soccer by a van:

Engaging in light-hearted hi-jinks:

Camping or something at dusk?:

That sounds great! They must have a great life! These events create a nice little addition to the group standing in the surf singing. Isn’t it strange that they never seem wet?

Here are the main problems with the video, though. First, this person:

What is she doing with One Direction? They want to be with me!

Ostensibly, the song is about a women who does not know she is beautiful. As a result, she is not some stuck up bitch who everyone hates. Instead, the very thing that makes her beautiful is that she doesn’t know she is beautiful. Wait a minute, I don’t know I’m beautiful! That must mean that One Direction is secretly in love with me!

Well, that’s the idea anyway. I’m pretty sure (based on what I’ve been able to glean from British tabloids) that the young men in One Direction are actually more interested in mixed-gender groups of elk and potato salad but that’s not really relevant to the video.

The other main issue I have is that there are five people in One Direction.

You have THE HAIR:

THE HAIR!

Then there is the vaguely ethnic guy who might be Hispanic or Italian or something:

Then you have the other three guys who have absolutely nothing notable about them. They have mildly ridiculous hair but nothing like THE HAIR’s hair. I’m pretty sure each member of the band has several lines in this song, but I can’t remember anything about those other three guys. How hard is it to come up with 5 distinct fake personalities for these guys? The Spice Girls knew how to do it right. I’d suggest having one of the guys be black, one of them be a tiny baby, and the last one deeply concerned about the effect of the special editions on Star Wars’s lasting legacy.

Get to work, I know you can do it.

-PTD