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MAGIC_FORMULA


                                             May    22, 2013
                                             August 29, 2013

     GREATEST_MUSIC_VIDEO


First, hold-up.  If you haven't actually
looked at the greatest music video ever made,
you don't want to read all of this sideways
commentary, hemming-and-hawing about the
source of it's appeal.  Don't wallow in
skepticism about the purity of the esthetics,
dive-in, embrace the moment, seize the daisy,
skip this ultimately empty, distant analytic       Tis perhaps a pale
meandering for now, and give the pure joy          shadow of the true
a chance to wash over you.                         dionysian ecstasy, but
                                                   the real thing is a
Once you *have* seen it, you might compare         little hard to take,
it to my *last* pick for greatest music video:     anyway.

         HYPERDOLLS
                                                              (March 18, 2014)
  It's disturbing how many of the              And long after first seeing it
  same elements are in play there:             as a kid, I became fascinated
  monsters, Japanese girls, and jokey          with "The Faerie Twins" (aka
  media satire.  You couldn't play             "The Peanuts") doing the
  the two of them back-to-back,                Mothera song.
  they'd kill each other's effect.
                                                  (We went to see Mothera
  Am I just some sort of asian-fetish,            last Mother's Day...)
  kawaii-junkie, godzilla baby,
  with tastes effectively hardwired
  by identity and upbringing?


  It's also distressing to look at
  some other work by the same
  director, for example his 1997
  "Faith No More" video that's a
  pretty silly jokey "satiric"          Wait, maybe it's an "homage":
  rip-off of Hitchcock's movie          http://vimeo.com/37349314
  Vertigo.
                                                  By my usual methods,
                                                  I should put this in
                                                  a page called "HO_MAGE".
     What makes one video work so
     well, and the other so stupid,                 Does the director make
     and flat?                                      a habit of raiding
                                                    films for material?

          It could be that the                      He often has a very,
          AKB48 video works better                  shall we say,
          simply because it has                     "cinematic" approach:
          a slightly wider range:
          a lot of the feeling of                     http://vimeo.com/59921519
          absuridity is from
          bouncing around between                   (An EMINEM video with
          different genres, channel                 Sasha Gray...)
          flipping through
          japanese trash media.

          In contrast, doing a                 Once you recognize formula
          video that references                as formula, it kills the
          a *single* movie                     magic.
          seems much less creative.

              But then, that Hyper-Dolls
              video, that has a tighter
              focus (a satire of super hero
              anime and monster movies),
              that for me works about as           It could be just that
              well as the AKB48.                   I've never particularly
                                                   *liked* Vertigo (The
                                                   scenes of SF are nice,
                                                   but it doesn't make any
                                                   sense).

                                                   Or maybe the trouble is
                                                   that with Vertigo, that
                                                   old familiar sensation
                                                   of the exotic is lost.






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