Welcome to Sartorial Sursday here on on Another Flavor! Satorial Sursday is the day we discuss the appearance of a person in a music video.

Rob Zombie is one of the most visually attuned musical artists around. (Is he still around? I think I remember reading that he died in a freak bungee jumping/blood transfusion accident.) I read an interview with him once (before his untimely demise) where he said he would buy albums entirely based on their covers. Maybe you can judge an album by its cover. Shouldn’t you be able to, though? The artist is involved in creating the album cover, so I think it should be representative of its contents. Same with books. The cover is a great way to judge! I think we all have a good idea what this book will be like:

Dragula was Rob Zombie’s first hit as a solo artist. On his own, he had total control over the look of his video and how he appeared in it. Here’s the video he made:

This video is awesome. Everything looks fake and ridiculous and I love it. The picture we will be looking at is this:

Rob Zombie has dreads, is wearing a huge amount of make-up, has a crazy beard, and is driving a ridiculous car (the Dragula).

I guess I just love [talking about people with dreads](/posts/satorial-surday- whats-up-by-4-non/). Once again I don’t have much to say about them except that it was the ’90s. I don’t believe that Rob Zombie was from Jamaica, but I haven’t done any research so he very well could be. Let’s go ahead and say he managed to crawl his way out of Kingston and onto the charts.

Zombie’s make-up is of the category called corpse paint. According to Atom and His Package on his song Me and My Black Metal Friends, corpse paint is a scary name for make-up. He also mentioned that in Norway “there’s nothing to do but kill each other and play guitars in the snow.” I think all of that applies to Rob Zombie. He is trying to look as scary as possible on what is, in essence, a dance song. When it comes to musical genres, image is almost everything. There isn’t a real difference between Cradle of Filth and Yes except Cradle of Filth has a scary name and scary make-up. That is why Cradle of Filth is black metal and Yes are prog rock.

Now, the car. The name “Dragula” is awesome but it implies a drag racer. That is not really what we get here. This is a better view of the car:

It has a skull on the shift lever and its exhaust pipes coming directly out of the engine look like devil horns. These are both awesome. The car itself looks more like a hot rod than a drag racer. It reminds me of what’s-his-face’s car from American Graffiti:

I guess there is a drag race in that movie, but that is definitely a hot rod. Totally boss.

Rob Zombie’s clothing in the video can be better seen in this shot:

For some reason he is dressed in an old-timey coat. Is he wearing breeches? I guess it is hard to tell. Some things we are just not meant to know.

-PTD

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