In the beginning there was the text (John 1:1) and immediately thereafter there was the meta-text. While the phrase “that’s so meta” is meaningless and annoying, the fact is that life is a meta activity. I mean, right now I’m writing about life, while living it (in only the loosest definition of “living”, of course) and no one thinks a damn thing of it. But when a piece of art is self-referential, we do think a damn thing of it. What do we think? “That’s so meta.”

The Breeders, in their video for Cannonball had an idea, “What if our video was about us making the video?” Sorry I didn’t warn you to sit down before saying that. Let’s take a brief break while everyone who thought Inception was mind-blowing changes their pants to do some Another Flavor blog meta-blogging.

For some reason YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm thinks that the perfect next video after literally anything I’ve just watched is Mexican Radio by Wall of Voodoo. Like, if I just watched something by Devo, okay, I can understand that. But, if I just finished watching Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus? I’m not sure what Skynet/YouTube’s recommendation engine is thinking.

Everybody good and clean now?

Okay, great. Now, sit down and put a new pair of pants on deck while you watch Cannonball by The Breeders:

The video opens, oddly enough, with a cannonball.

While it does appear periodically throughout the video, the cannonball is a non sequitur.

We also get some cool singing from the singer with her face in the water.

Finally, we get to the heart of the video. Here we see the singer rocking out on her guitar.

Since the band is playing in front of a mirror, you can see the lighting people setting up the lights in the background.

Next, there are some close-up shots of the drummer playing furiously, and you can see the rest of the band talking and drinking coffee in the background.

It’s like we’re behind the scenes or VH1 behind the music or something.

That isn’t to say that there’s no video, only its making, though. We get some sweet head bobs from the singer.

There’s also a very cool effect with hand-drawn frames like this:

The frame isn’t static, it changes rapidly to make a faux-animation squiggle-vision-stravaganza.

Those kinds of shots aren’t the focus of the video, though. Instead, it’s things like the band turning around to play directly into the mirror.

Which, of course, gives a good opportunity to see the people filming the video moving equipment around behind them.

Suddenly, the band is dressed differently and appears to be putting on make-up in a dressing room.

It seems like maybe this is supposed to be their real clothes for the actual video, but instead of seeing them through the camera that they are clearly playing for, we see them through a camera off to the side that shows all the lights and equipment in the background.

This is exactly the kind of shot you get in a “making of” which gives you a glimpse behind the scenes, but we aren’t seeing the making of anything here. This is the actual thing.

I want to note what the drummer is wearing for the “real” video because it is hiliariously incongruous with the rest of the band’s clothing and makes me think they were trying to shame him or something.

The video ends with a plain shot of the band, standing on a mostly empty set.

I really dig the concept for this video. It doesn’t come off as pretentious at all, even though the idea might seem “high concept”. It really seems like the band is just having fun, and fun in videos is contagious.

Join me next week for either a blog post or a blog post about blogging the post.

-PTD