By gaiJen, stranger in a strange land
St. Vincent – “Actor Out of Work”
I am quietly horrified by the video for St. Vincent’s “Actor out of Work”. I've watched this video so many times and I can't quite put my finger on it...her wide eyes, her slow enunciation of every word, the slight shake of her head, the actors in the chair across from her? I don't know. At any moment Annie Clark looks as if she might unhinge her jaw and swallow us whole. :::shivers:::
Everything Everything – “Suffragette Suffragette”
I love this kind of pop kookiness. Who *will* sit on our face when you're gone?
Weezer – “Undone (Sweater Song)”
I'm bending the rules a bit with this one but as most people know this as the sweater song, I thought I might be able to slip it under the fence as it were. I plan to give a deeper treatment to Weezer in a few weeks but I wanted to mention this song here because this is the first Weezer song I ever heard. The Blue album came out in 1994 which was many many years ago and probably before some of your birth years, you sweet young things, you. I remember leaving a concert at the Sunken Gardens in San Antonio, a bronco full of high school girls belting out this song, windows down, arms out, totally freaking obnoxious. It was great. This song and this album are an emotional touchstone for me. All I need is to hear the opening few bars and I am back in that bronco, laughing and annoying everyone within hearing distance.
I think what really makes the St. Vincent video so uncomfortable for me is that it's so confrontational. The entire thing feels like an overwhelming glimpse at rejection.
ReplyDeleteNice touch to cover St. Vincent. Two of my good friends here in Richmond went to Berklee with her and say that this video captures her quite well; she was a badass around campus then and everyone knew that she would go on to be successful. I'd like to see her live.
ReplyDelete-Sean
'Actor Out of Work' is brilliant! Thanks for the write up. The first time I saw it, it gave me those excited shivers I rarely get from music anymore. I've watched it repeatedly as well.
ReplyDeleteI don't see it as intimidating or creepy. It makes me smile every time.... it's just ridiculous and dramatic... like actors. Makes me think about all the actors without a stage out there in the real world looking for work, love, etc and selling themselves as something they aren't. Clarke might cast herself as the arbiter of their worth in whatever role they are seeking, but she's talented enough... she's earned that place in the video without seeming self-centered. Her gestures and over-enunciations hint that she might be just as big a fake as they all are...
I can't get enough of that video... really pumps me up every time.
I think I find it horrifying because it has this power to elicit a real emotional response - I literally get goosebumps watching these people scream and rail and cry - only to have the 'actors' abruptly get up and blithely walk away. This video manipulates my real emotions with such masterful pantomime; calls into question the validity of my own emotional response. Am I just another actor, off stage and mouthing along to the lines I've rehearsed in the off-chance I am thrust in front of a faceless audience? Or am I a critic, judging with arched eyebrow and unwilling to be moved?
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