At any rate, I thought it would be interesting if every other month or so, I wrote about one of my favourite music videos from each year, reserving the discussion only for videos that seem to aspire to something greater than the usual promotional gestures or the basic gone-but-then-forgotten generators of consumer hype. Although it's generally true that most media spectators can find at least some worth in the work of directors like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry or Chris Cunningham (to name a few), there are still a number of videos that go without celebration, simply because many choose to see them as nothing more than empty promotional-work with no artistic merit, which of course, seems a little unfair – especially when many of the greatest music videos feature more creativity and imagination than the average feature film.
This particular clip, Ready for the Floor, by the British electro-pop band Hot Chip, strikes me as a particularly vibrant example of the perfect pop video; clever, concise, and above all else unique to the image of the band. In a few basic frames it succeeds in capturing the eye of the potential viewer with its unforgettable visual presentation; mixing pop-culture and pop-art in a way that makes it approachable, not only as an exciting piece of music-television, but also as something that wouldn't seem out of place in the pages of a glossy, ultra-hip, art and design magazine, such as Juxtapoz or PIG.
The notion that this particular combination of sound and image seems very modern, very fresh, and in some ways characteristic of a generation defined by its fascination with second-hand style or an obsession with childhood nostalgia.
Ready for the Floor directed by Nima Nourizadeh, 2008:
Ready for the Floor is exactly what I was describing in the earlier post when I referred to the "emphasis on the conceptual element; of lines, shapes, colours and contrasts." It is, in other words, a concept video - the kind that has become increasingly passé over the subsequent year, with several high-profile mainstream artistes successfully copying a similar look and feel from the video in question to the point where this particular appropriation, or look, has become predictable, or worse, entirely generic. For example, an electro-pop band in the year 2009 who want to appear on the vanguard of the avant-garde can easily throw in a few Commodore 64 effects or references to the kind of subject-matter that Kraftwerk were singing about on the album Computer World (1981) and still find themselves on the right side of the cutting edge.
However, we should remember that Hot Chip had been developing this kind of sound since 2004; even as the scene was still swooning for the lad-rock of bands like The Libertines and Arctic Monkeys. It feels specific to their image – to the image that their music creates, and to the particular personality of the band as a whole. That mixture of the nostalgic - exemplified by the current wave of 1980s style-references in fashion and design - mixed with the contemporary; the post-post modern notion that any idea has relevance, regardless of where it came.
The director of this clip, Nima Nourizadeh, took the song's throwaway reference to the Tim Burton-directed Batman (1989) - "you're my number one guy" (rather that than the more endlessly quotable "this town needs an enema") - and ran with it; creating a neon-coloured ode to Jack Nicholson's Joker by way of Ceaser Romero. The iconography is particularly relevant to anyone who grew up during that specific period, circa the late 1980s; from the two-face references predominantly evident in the dancing Vicky Vales' or the literal split-personality of lead-singer Alexis Taylor (who here looks like a cross-between the late-80s kids' show presenter Timmy Mallet and a Spike-era Elvis Costello), to the birthday gifts filled with poisonous gas, the Tetris-themed production design and the ghosts of Robert Palmer's oft-parodied video for his song Addicted to Love. It also reminds me a little of the classic videos that New Order made for the singles Blue Monday and True Faith; where the ideas of performance and conceptual design were blended together to create Haute Culture pantomime pieces; or something that might have been more at home in the Guggenheim than broadcast on MTV.
Although the video tells a story, placing the band at the mercy of an evil genius and forced to carry out a series of offbeat tasks in order to guarantee their escape (or so we assume), it doesn't really conform to any easily identifiable narrative like some of the more ambitious music videos often do. Instead, it presents these scenes as sketches that flow, one into the next, as if following the panels of a comic-strip (again, the retro Batman references of the pre-Chris Nolan variety). We can trace the line, left to right, like the vocals drifting from speaker to speaker, and pulled by that looped guitar riff that carries us through the song.
It also plays on the title, which, as written, could be something as innocent as ready for the dance floor - especially given the up-tempo nature of the music - but here, in the visual sense, seems evocative of something like the killing floor; in which the ready participants must sing karaoke into a microphone gun, or traverse a big-top style torture chamber that reminds us of a Game Boy classic.
Ready for the Floor directed by Nima Nourizadeh, 2008:
Tetris designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov, 1984:
Ready for the Floor directed by Nima Nourizadeh, 2008:
