Ready for the Floor

A continuation of a theme that I accidentally stumbled upon a month ago with my post on the Florence and the Machine video for Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up); the realisation that Lights in the Dusk needed something a little more colourful and contemporary to elevate it above the kind dreary nonsense so often featured on the pages of this blog. It could also be seen as a clear attempt to smuggle in some music discussion through the backdoor... which is always fun, but not enough to dedicate an entire space to.

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:

Pull My Heart Away

Quite possibly the second most impressive music video of 2009, made all the more remarkable in this particular instance given the fact that the performer, Jack Peñate, was a recording artist pretty far off my musical radar before the beginning of the year, and that's putting it politely. In fact, I genuinely despised his first album and the whole NME approved mock-cockney conversational vocals over a Housemartins-lite backing track shtick that he had goin' on circa 2007. Perhaps I was just being bitter because my own career as a singer songwriter had ended so catastrophically (although, to be honest, I never really put the work in); but even so the lightweight faux-indie-pop styling of his earlier work and image certainly didn't prepare me for this shift into a vaguely late '80s but also quite contemporary The Cure meets a James Ford production style effort that this particular track is steeped in. And while the song shimmers with chiming guitar riffs and confident multi-tracked vocals, the video itself more than matches the adventure with this hazy evocation of burnt-out desert desolation that perfectly captures the juxtaposition of the joyous abandon and intense melancholy explicit in the verse/chorus interchange.

Once again I can't really put into words what is so remarkable about this clip. I guess like the Florence and the Machine video that I wrote about in August, this particular video seems like it's been sent out as a transmission from another world; a world where artists aren't obliged to sell their music, or themselves in order to make a mark, and where the finished product doesn't scream "buy me, buy me, buy me" in an endorsement of its own cultural insignificance. There's no regard for fashion here - but at the same time it looks incredibly fashionable, precisely because it looks like nothing else (or at least nothing else that's being produced right now). In fact, it looks like it could have come from 1968 or 1988, or 1991 for that matter: superficially bringing to mind the Stéphane Sednaoui-directed video for the U2 single Mysterious Ways. The fact that it just happens to comes from this year, a year dominated by theatrically minded young women with synthesisers and a penchant for suggestive stage attire, lazily provocative pop acts, award show invasions and a host of gone-but-then-forgotten flavour of the month R&B groups trying to spice up the usual urban posturing with a touch of Grime, makes it all the more exciting.

Pull My Heart Away directed by Jack Peñate & Cherise Payne, 2009:

The visual associations might be entirely personal, but for me the look of this video and the exotic evocation of ruined temples, figures in the landscape, ecstasy and shadow dancing recall elements of loosely avant-garde filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Kenneth Anger and Philippe Garrel. Though such particular associations are no doubt accidental, put there by my own overactive imagination (because that's just the way my mind registers these images), it nonetheless enlivens this clip with a sense of something greater. A window into something, and not just something designed to sell records or catch the eye of the passing vidiot, but something that works at creating a suggestion of the song's intent. It is after all a fairly twee lyric about the breakup of a relationship and could have quite easily been reduced to the kind of nonsense of Second Minute or Hour, where the video doesn't really offer anything beyond, you know, promoting the song (and the elements of the song that are most saleable). Instead, Peñate and the director have decided to produce a video that interprets the themes behind the song; the emptiness of failure, the loneliness of the post-breakup mindset, the barren wasteland of life beyond that sense of purpose; the exploration of the ancient ruins of existence as viewed through a glass orb that obscures the memory even further, like the lyrics to a pop song.

"It's not like my feet are stuck to the floor –" he sings, and indeed, this is a video full of movement; full of awkward dancing around objects; a half-hearted celebration, to "dance the pain away" as someone once wrote. It's quaint. Peñate may indeed still be a prick, but there's desperation to the movement, to this event, which seems to be perfectly in line with the general tone of the music. In the images there are traces of Fata Morgana, of the climactic dream sequence in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, of the "Falconer" scene in Le Lit de la vierge, or of the general aimless exploration of The Inner Scar. Perhaps these similarities don't register to anyone else; perhaps you disagree with me, or think I'm talking bull-shit, but the reminder of these objects, for me, is as special as the objects themselves. To me, this is a brave piece of music promotion; it's simple to the point of 'let's go to Jordan with a Super 8 camera and film some stuff'-simple; it's not immediately exciting; it's not glamorous; it celebrates the old, the ancient - but these things make it worthy of merit. More importantly though, it's the sense that these images don't immediately spring to mind when you hear the song, but when you see the two put together it works perfectly, and afterwards you can't imagine one existing without the other.