Determined to share this rag and bone shop of the target heart rate with our readership who are either too serious about running to watch treadmill television, or not nearly serious enough about running to watch treadmill television, I share with you here all the music videos (or all the ones I could find online) that I watched during a recent 40 minute stint on a Boston Sports Club treadmill, with accompanying analysis.
I went with the shadiest and grimiest of the Sports Club music channels – the Dance channel – because anything worth doing is worth doing to techno music. The collage of it takes on a life of its own. When you open your mind to the Dance channel and consider what it is actually showing, coexisting in the same artistic space, presenting an accidental grand narrative fueled by endorphins and dull ankle pain, it’s a sublime, glorious and terrifying experience. Especially when it starts with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3ppTnOIc
That’s right, Australia and Austin, Texas EDM fans, that’s Jacinta with her hit, “Can’t Keep a Secret.” Jacinta doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but she does has a MySpace page, and her own website, www.chunkymusic.com.
More on Jacinta, and the rest of the rabbit hole, after the jump. Make sure to stretch first!
1. Jacinta: “Can’t Keep a Secret”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDM3ppTnOIc
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” by Wallace Stevens, is a metapoem that sets down goals, values and aspirations for the poetical project — what creative artists are trying to accomplish, but never really will, at least ever for very long. The “Notes” are built around three declarations about this Supreme Fiction — not particularly in this order — “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure.” The second declaration means that nothing can be the Supreme Fiction for very long — just as human life is fleeting and the human race and all of nature are fleeting, art is also fleeing, and art that counterfeits toward permanence cannot be the greatest artistic expression of humanity. “Nothing gold can stay,” as Robert Frost said, as he is wont to say — just as smartly but in a lot fewer words.
Why do I bring this up? Because I think, for one glorious moment and not a second longer, “Can’t Keep a Secret” was the greatest music video ever made. I don’t think I have ever seen anything go “YOU GO GIRL” harder in my life.
And then, for every other moment of human existence, it looked like somebody’s mom accidentally blundered into the “Make a Music Video!” booth at Busch Gardens after having one too many at Das Festhaus.
Messagewise, “Can’t Keep a Secret” is very similar to “Shout” by Tears for Fears, joining the rather small but notable subset of synth-backed pop tracks about the therapeutic value of sharing rather than repressing your emotions. Except Jacinta is really really enjoying it. Maybe it’s jus the runner’s high.
2. Mint Royale: “Singing in the Rain”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcYa9b7mMmA
Immediately you see the scope of the Dance channel – we go from something that you could make in your basement with a bedsheet, chromakey and some poorly fitting outfits to a fairly sophisticated bunch of motion-capture-driven computer animation played by a member of the Fatboy Slim set. The collage is incidential, but if I might apply meaning to it where no existence precedes its essence, it demonstrates how dance, specifically techno dance, is democratizing. The goal of booty-shaking is so all-encompassing that it really doesn’t matter how you get it done or with what tools, as long as you get it done. This is something Hall & Oates wish were true of their music, so they would have stayed on top through the ascendancy of music videos while sounding awesome despite looking ridiculous.
Mint Royale primarily does remixes (and is famous enough to have a Wikipedia page), and the premise of the Singing in the Rain video seems really far removed from the premise of the remix, although I guess he’s stuck in a dirty subway underpass while having an adventure going B-Boy style with a bunch of garbage animated by his imagination or some related presentational phenomenon, showing that he is finding the art and joy in an undesirable situation — Singing in the Rain, as it were.
3. Brian Anthony: “WhatsitgonnaB”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54i3q6jmQg4
Each of these videos finds a new way of blowing my mind, and this one does it by waiting until it is almost half over before revealing that it is in fact from an extremely bizarre source. Watch it up to about 1:04, with the big reveal at 1:15. It’s okay, I didn’t believe it either.
Before about 1:04, this is a normal dance video, but after 1:15 it is revealed this is actually from a “Music Inspired by the Film” remix project for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. This movie was notable of course for:
- Being an unapologetic, profitable piece of crap that was a sequel to an unapologetic, profitable piece of crap
- Starring Lawrence Fischburne without anybody knowing it starred Lawrence Fischburne
- Writing a case study in cowardice. They were too scared to take the chance of putting Galactus in a giant purple helmet because some people might not like it, so instead they made him a generic, nondescript sci fi villain, which nobody really liked.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video of a song from a movie that included clips from that movie be so totally unconcerned with letting you know it is from a movie. But apparently, this whole Silver Surfer Techno Remix thing actually worked; supposedly it was quite popular overseas (where, interestingly enough, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer made more than half of its box office take).
Apparently, this is sort of what Brian Anthony does; in this research, I found he also did a remixed dance track for the sountrack to Dragonball: Abomination, the live-action Dragon Ball Z movie. So, good on him for haivng no qualms about totally disregarding the movies he is making songs for. He’ll live longer.
The Silver Surfer definitely works as a techno icon, I have to say. Despite the video not fitting in with the Fantastic Four sequel at all, the Silver Surfer fits pretty perfectly into the video. The song is about a guy propositioning somebody for sexual relations (“about” is used loosely). This guy is surrounded by women and doesn’t let on that he’s into dudes or anything, but he seems quite gay, and everyting moves really fast in a way that is kinetic but doesn’t carry narrative force. Brian Anthony is a lot like the Silver Surfer — if you stop and think about him too much, he doesn’t make any sense at all except as a gay icon, which he sort of isn’t for reasons that aren’t entirely clear except that maybe he isn’t quite famous enough. So, whatever, he does his thing for a few minutes and you move on to the next thing.
Oh, and except that Brian Anthony doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, while the Silver Surfer has a disambiguation page with at least five solid hits.
Disambiguation? Ha, yeah right.
4. Cascada: Miracle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCzz4_FPbug
Finally, a song we sort of recognize. Sort of. This song is from the album “Every Time We Touch,” by Cascada, which is fitting, because it is pretty much the same song as “Every Time We Touch,” by Cascada (except for being strictly worse). Here, for comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G6QDNC4jPs
Now, “Miracle” is a bad song. I knew it from the first few lines.
Boy meets girl
You were my dream, my world
But I was blind
You cheated on me from behind.
I’m starting to get bored of people saying “Really? Really?” as a joke, but “Really? Really?” I don’t know exactly how you cheat on somebody from behind. I know how you cheat on somebody behind their back, but that’s mostly redundant anyway, because it’s pretty damn rare to cheat on someone to their face. But yeah, I guess if you get behind somebody back, and then you get ready to cheat on that person, but wait … no, move your knee it’s in the way. Ouch! Dammit! Sorry, sorry.
Seriously, “You cheated from me from behind” is the worst line I’ve heard in a song in a long time. And of course, after this woman has not only been humiliated by her boyfriend, but has humiliated herself in front of everybody by choosing a really awkward way to describe it, what is the song about? Why, getting him back of course! What did you think it was about?
Sigh.
Why do so many songs give such terrible, terrible relationship advice? Somebody should sue these people.
This song reminds me a lot of one of the worst relationship songs of all time, because it not only gives women terrible ideas about how to conduct relationships, but it encourages the absolute worst in men by promoting a dangerous counterfactual fantasy — the best “stalker-/ephebophiliac-encouragement” song not made by the Police (who made several), “Sometimes” by Britney Spears:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0bPrt69rag&ob=av2e
Sometimes I run
Sometimes I hide
Sometimes I’m scared of you
But all I really want is to hold you tight
Treat you right
Be with you day and night.
Baby all I need is time.
Okay, maybe I heard this song as more sinister than it was intended, but I posit that all Britney Spears music is by design more sinister than it lets on – it’s part of the aesthetic. I mean, have you listened to Slave 4 U lately? No? Just me then. Okay. Back to Cascada.
Cascada’s song is full of codependent nonsense. It’s addressed to the guy who cheated on her, asking him for a miracle, which, um, puts him on a bit of a pedestal, to say the least. Then it rhymes “miracle” with “be your girl” which is just embarrassing. Then it tries to entice the guy by saying he should give her a chance to see if he was made for her. This of course is not information that the guy would generally be interested in knowing – he’d be far more interested if she was made for him. Her beliefs about what he is destined to do are not something he cares very much about, because he just cheated on her.
Also, this whole exercise is going toward confirming a fundamentally misled idea of how this relationship works – she is using her love, her adoration for this guy as proof that the relationship must continue. She is with him day and night, she really really loves him, all this other stuff – but the reason the relationship has to stop is because the guy cheated on her, “from behind,” no less! She then says “One day you’ll see, it can happen to me” — using her own desperation and envy of other women in an attempt to persuade her cheating boyfriend to take her back. None of the supporting arguments Cascada is providing are relevant to the question at hand.
Plus, whenever it gets back to the chorus, I’m almost certain it’s going to jump into “But every time we touch, I get this feeling …” and then it’s disappointing because this is the inferior Cascada song, and life is too short for inferior Cascada songs.
5. Frederick Ford: “Turn My World Around”
Okay guys, prepare yourselves. We’re going back to Jacinta country. And I don’t mean Austin or Australia. Here be dragons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJi-mN1KSdM
This video leaves me kind of speechless. It may be one of the worst music videos ever made.
If “Frederick Ford” sounds like a porn name, it’s because, judging from the YouTube comments, he used to do porn, or still does it. And I can’t/don’t want to do any research on him, because the sites you get when you google him are blocked on this computer for being pornography. So, you know what, I’m going to not do any research on this rat-lookin’ dude.
I mean, I want him to succeed and everything, because who doesn’t love parachutes or whatever, but, to quote one of the YouTube comments:
“worst thing ive ever seen in my life. someone needs to burn that rotating box”
You may wonder why I kept watching these videos. Well, for one thing, they were bizarre and hilarious — always unexpected. Some of them were even pretty good. For another, I was running pretty hard, and the uptempo music was good to keep the pace up. For a third, well, I did it for you guys. And for a fourth, the likelihood of finding something worse if I changed the channel was pretty high. Watching commercials while running on a treadmill sucks. So, Excelsior!
6. Lasgo: “Out of My Mind”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08yLol56ODg
The fonts in this video are what convinced me to actually follow through and write this thing, because they are awesome. If they gave an award for best use of fonts in a music video, this should win all of them. Maybe putting the fonts next to postmodern interpretations of classic sex symbols also got my Overthinking going. You’ve got the cool bubbly sanserif retro-even-for-the-80s font for the pink microphone costume, the Blade Runner / Star Trek TNG font for the road race costume, the broader, more elegant but still sci-fi white font for the elegantly overwrought robo-costume, the breezy cursive-inspired sanserif for the angel costume, the blocky serif outline font for the boxer costume (which doesn’t show up until late in the video), and the most obliquely referenced font, which is the actual “Lasgo” font on the packaging for the doll.
There are three angles at play in this video – there’s the fonts, the costumes (or themes) and the colors. They all come in sets – the racecar girl is always red and always has the Blade Runner / TNG font, but there are parts of the video where the text really jumps out, or the costumes really jump out, or the colors are oscillated quickly enough that the rest recedes.
This plays off the dance aesthetic that informs a lot of these videos – this is music that speaks to an altered state of consciousness where people respond to really blown-out symbols – where things are iconic, motivations are boiled down, and subtletly is lost in the bass and the lights. Everything strives for the iconic. Lasgo uses this as a platform for discussing modes of femininity – not in a particularly original way, but with cool design and nice execution. Of course, all the women are the same person in different costumes. This speaks to the idea that notions of “woman” are reductive, reflecting rather than a signification of a single person a mere facet or aspect of what that person might project when viewed from a particular vantage point. Same woman, different clothes. Same words, different fonts. Form and function are linked, though — race car girl is a different character than angel girl, and “love” means different things in the different fonts.
As I mentioned in my past articles on dance music, one of the things I really like about dance music is how it hammers home the connection of form and function. Dance music is form with purpose – it is made to make you dance. This video illustrates how the changing forms in the colors, fonts and costumes changes the function of the woman in the video, without it changing the “actual” woman, which in turn teaches us something about ourselves and our depth and complexity as human beings.
7. Samim: “Heater”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKZw15DXFiI&ob=av2e
Or you can do it the easy way and just show a bunch of people dancing. I like how the accordion is a symbol of multiculturalism at the same time it is a mockery of multiculturalism. Exclusion principle be damned!
This is as good a time as any to note that most of this music comes from outside the United States, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all unpopular or obscure. A lot of these artists have charted, particular in Britain, particularly on Dance charts. So, it’s not like BSC raided somebody’s external hard drive for freelance video projects. But with the international scope comes, well, diversity. A music video means different things to different people, and serves different purposes to different artists.
I bring this up now because our next video is one of my favorites, for a lot of reasons.
Hey, how do you know a guy isn’t betting on ever becoming successful in the United States? Because he calls himself:
8. Basshunter: “Angel in the Night”
Looks like there’s a Swedish guy who didn’t go to www.basshunter.com before picking his techno name! (and no, that website is not blocked as pornography — it’s quite harmless, unless you’re a fish,)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYO9VgoRWzY&ob=av2e
At first I was a bit disappointed when this came up, because it’s got by far the highest production values of any of the videos we’ve watched so far. Except for maybe the garbage dancing one and maybe Cascada if somebody took that damned light out of her face, it’s the only one that gives the impression that “the music industry and/or a professional filmmaker made this.” But it quickly won me over, not in small part because it heavily and smartly references the greatest Scandinavian music video ever made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EXxMlIExpo
Similar to the A Ha video, Basshunter’s bassterpiece goes from a diner for lonely hearts to a fantasy racetrack, with lots of fun, bouncy music to carry you along the way and an earnest, warmhearted appeal for affection from a singer who almost wouldn’t dare suggest such a thing were possible, except that he is compelled by intense emotion to make the attempt. Compare it to “WhatsitgonnaB” from back when I wasn’t sweating so much. Leave it to Basshunter to show a little humility.
At this point, I’d suffered quite a bit of inhumanly arrogant posturing, even by people who should know better (Get back in your rotating box! Nobody said you could leave!), so this was really touching, and the “jam” in the middle was pretty cool — it was like Gran Turismo on Playstation with music supplied by a particularly enthusiastic Super Nintendo. Also, leave it to Basshunter to be the only person on the Dance station who knows how to Tokyo Drift.
Of course, it’s possible to see Basshunter as also dispensing horrible relationship advice, more in the Richard Marx mode of “If you just love them enough and pity yourself enough and humiliate yourself enough, the woman you have specially chosen for the task will eventually love you back,” but just as that’s not really fair to Richard Marx, since we’ve all felt that way from time to time, especially when we were young and didn’t know anything about anything, it’s probably not fair to Basshunter. Basshunter seems to be unreasonably hard on himself in this song, to the point where maybe we don’t have to entirely believe that he’s really totally obsessed with this girl he can’t have — more like he protests too much, and he’s probably goign to get this girl with this song, because it’s a sweet, fun song that showcases both whimsy and masculine vigor — as well as car racing. And he does mention she smiles at him and stuff, and he says “let me hold you now” in a way that indicates such a thing is about to happen, so she’s at least nibbling at the ‘Hunter’s bait.
He also has the guts to straight-up state that it isn’t enough for the girl to be his light in the dark, he also needs to actually be with her. This is an important insight that is to often skipped over. There are a lot of people out there who could have been saved a lot of trouble around freshman year of college (give or take, say, three years) if they’d known how that all works ahead of time.
Also note that, at the beginning of the video, the girl dumps her boyfriend via text message for cheating on her and you never see him again and she never wants him back. No word on whether it was from behind or not.
9. Rae and Christian: “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iItm3f6MGEY
This is a remix of the Dinah Washington version of the old country/jazz standard. I find it a bit tedious and the video to be way too on the nose. We all like cartoons, sure, but after this blizzard of deconstructed archetypes, hypothetical imperatives, flashing lights, pounding bass, and rotating boxes a cartoon that sort of does and sort of doesn’t (boo again, Exclusion principle!) depict the events in a 60 year old song is kind of meh.
It also was kind of crappy running music — I was up to 9 mph duing Basshunter; I had to scale it way back for this one. It was about where I started losing energy and realized the gym was going to close soon.
The trombone or tuba or whichever muddy thing is rattling along down there is awful. It’s too sloppy to be looped; they should have just played it for a while and let it feel more organic.
The straight up jazz versions of this song are just better than this remix, which takes away a fair measure of the song’s elegance and makes it too ponderous. This version in particular is a lot of fun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR-Ckj5M-jU
The whole thing smacks heavily enough of minstrelsy for me to not like it all that much in any form. The phrase “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby” comes from Octavus Roy Cohen, a Jewish writer from South Carolina who wrote HILARIOUS dialect fiction about those HILARIOUS “Southern Negroes” for the HILARIOUS Saturday Evening Post. Quoth his Wikipedia page: “If his people seemed to possess the usual mythical Negro qualities of drollery and miscomprehensions, his tales at any rate were spirited.”
So yeah, of all the Jazz songs to pick up on and remix, this one is just kind of ugly, and it was made uglier by a slow and joyless remix. I did not like this song.
10. Tim Deluxe: “Let the Beats Roll”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpgaX6R4iww&ob=av2e
This is Tim Deluxe’s answer to “Mama Said Knock You Out” and “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” where he informs us he has come back from somewhere. Great. Welcome back, Tim Deluxe, from wherever it is you went to wherever it is you are now and were before you left. I guess it’s the U.K. on all counts.
— By the way, it occurred to me today that, while Jay-Z claims to be the “best rapper alive,” if you want to talk about overall versatility, appeal, viability, enduring influence on hip hop and long-term success (neither of them are in even the top ten of lyrical virtuosity), LLCoolJ from the aforementioned “Mama Said Knock You Out” has at least some claim to the title — as he exercised with his dubiously named latter-day album, G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) It’s a bit of a nonsequitur, but it’s useful sometimes to remember which rappers are still alive so that when Jay-Z goes bragging you can check his facts. Dispute this? Leave a comment! Leave a comment regardless! —
The beats in this Tim Deluxe song rolled. The video was about breakdancing. Competent, polished, but it lacked the desperation and joy of the poorer contributions and the fun of the richer ones. Maybe tough-guy white-guy techno is an easier sell in the U.K. than it is in the states. Well, at any rate, my run was coming to a close, so I could ponder these things later.
Cooldown: Armand Van Helden: “U Don’t Know Me”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNSpLqmY6K0
Minus points for the “U.” Get with the program, Armand.
This song was a #1 hit in the U.K. in 1999. Top of the charts #1 hit, not just a dance track hit. That doesn’t seem justifiable at all, because this song just seems awful. Then, I read that it knocked “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” by the Offspring off the throne, and I guess that makes more sense. I also guess the U.K. likes disco samples.
Afterword
And with that, the treadmill ground to a halt and I was informed the gym was closed and I had to leave. All in all, a solid workout, and a tour de force through the brilliant and terrible of a style music I really don’t know a great deal about it.
Pop culture is so pervasive now, and we interact with it in so many ways, that it’s worthwhile to consider experiences like treadmill television – if not alongside big tentpole motion pictures, at least with some of the same words.
And it sure does pass the time when you’re hamster-wheeling it to nowhere.
(N.B.- If you do the math, you’ll realize this isn’t quite 40 minutes. Other than the few seconds of downtime between each song, which adds up over 40 minutes, there was one song I didn’t bother writing down because it pissed me off so much, and then after the fact I couldn’t remember what it was. The song was okay, but it was a live performance by a techno band, which meant it was really poorly mixed and just didn’t make sense — lots of random shots of these guys smiling and muffled techno along with crowd cheers. Waste of time. Long track too. So yeah, that’s why it doesn’t quite add up.)
What do you listen to or watch on the treadmill? How is the artistic experience altered? Sound off in the comments!