Sunday, September 28, 2008

Content and Form, Music and Video



NIGHT and WISH.

This video, came recommend by a friend, pseudo hippie organic music loving friend who is a big fan of Rachel Yamagata, so the intense metal quality took me by surprise. It had a hard Dragonforce quality to it, with a fast drumbeat that at once made the speakers on my laptop seem like tiny little bits of hail scratching a tin roof. The video too had a Dragonforce like twinge, beginning with the classic "aren't we friggin' sweet playing our instruments intensely?!" camera swings around the band's setup. As the hard drums lead to the lead singer's voice I was surpised twice more, not only by the operatic quality and the obvious vocal talent, but by the heavy scandanavian accent. This was not the band I thought it was.

The video then progressed to a shot of a man rowing on a boat. The boat looked as if it floated straight out of the pages of Beowulf or from one of the adventures of Cuchulainn (an ancient Irish folk hero similar to Achilles). There is a cloaked woman on the boat staring longingly out at the water. The gorgeous haze of the grey sky accentuating the woman's pale face by seperating it from the men on the boat. This was curious to me as the song was, though sung by a female vocalist, definetly about a man. As this thought crossed my mind a man appeared in what looked like a rock cell.

As the video progresed you see red sunsets siloughette the pale faced woman, dark shots of the woman in the forest, and even a shot of the woman as a shimmering image appearing before the imprisoned man.

As the end of the song came it brought with it a shot of the woman, walk towards the sunset and disappear before our eyes.



Explaination:
The form of the video, in my mind, begins as an admittance of it's being. That is a wordy way of saying it knows it's a music video, nothing more spectacular than that. As it begins it's about the music (as most good music videos should be [unless it's a radiohead video, because those are almost always great and don't make any sense at all, much less as a vehicle for the music]). But as the video progresses we see that it has a lot of story, which is heavily important to the song. The spectacle moves away from the playing of instruments, though not completely lost (and for the better I think, 'cause damn, those kids can play), and into the fairy tale world.
And as we delve deeper and deeper into the world, we see that the song isn't about the man like the words woudl superficially suggest, but about the woman. It's the woman's love song to her secret lover.

I feel that this is expressed by my focusing on the music at first, moving past the music to it being a story, then within the story focusing on the woman. The song and the video do not overtly explain my conclusion of it being the woman's song, but they subtly hint at it more and more as the video progresses, as I did with my 300 words.
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1 comment:

coelder said...

Hey, I just did an interview with paleface and mo. they are quite a duo and just thought you might want to check out what they had to say.
http://womenartmoney.blogspot.com/2008/09/clicking-around-with-music-paleface.html

September 29, 2008 at 9:58 PM

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