The Pinocchio Theory

The Weeknd, video trilogy from Beauty Behind the Madness: The Hills, Can’t Feel My Face, Tell Your Friends — (Grant Singer, 2015)

These three videos, all from the same album, and all directed by Grant Singer, form a loose trilogy. They are unified by the presence of a demonic figure, played by Rick Wilder. Wilder was the lead singer of The Mau-Maus, a Los Angeles glam rock band in the 1979s-80s. Wilder initially worked with Singer, in the music video for Ariel Pink’s song Dayzed Inn Daydreams: this is a beautiful and moving video, that gives a portrait of Wilder as an aging, lonely rocker, working a day job in the supermarket and peforming before sparse audiences in the evening. Wilder is an incredibly charismatic figure; evidently, he plays a very different role in these videos for The Weeknd.

The Hills is a downbeat, minor key song; the vocal line hovers in a high register against dissonant and sludgy instrumentation. The lyrics give expression to The Weeknd’s nihilistic hedonism, focused largely on sex and drugs (as in this line from the chorus: “When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me”). And he’s telling his lust interest that he’s not one for commitment, but only for immediate pleasure (“I just fucked two bitches ‘fore I saw you”). The line repeated in the bridge, “the hills have eyes,” refers to a gruesome 1977 horror film of that title by Wes Craven, about a family of cannibals in the Nevada desert.

Part of what makes Abel Tesfaye (to give The Weeknd his actual name) such a powerful and fascinating artist is the way he delivers these harsh, negative sentiments in such a soulful singing voice, a voice filled with pain, loneliness, and yearning. There’s a mixture of tones and feelings here, a sort of cognitive dissonance, that refuses resolution – it grabs hold of me and will not let go.

The video for The Hills feels like a slow-motion nightmare. It begins, during the instrumental introduction, with four shots (corresponding to the song’s opening four dissonant chords) of a car having overturned on a quiet, and evidently expensive, Los Angeles residential street. In each shot, the camera revolves a small distance around the car; each shot blacks out when the corresponding chord is cut off. We are not given any indication of what caused the accident; it is just a given situation at the start of the video. As the singing begins, we see Abel pulling himself out of the driver’s seat of the car. A woman pulls herself out of the other front seat, and Abel moves around the car and opens the back door for a second woman to crawl out. Then, as we move from the opening verse to the first chorus, Abel simply walks away from the accident. One of the women goes up to him, screams at him and shoves him — but he just ignores her. All this has a strange, dissociated feel because of the way that it is shot. Abel has blood smeared over his face, but we cannot see it too well, because the lighting is indirect and murky (the accident seems to have happened just at dusk). (Grant Singer is an absolute master of lighting, as we saw earlier in the semester when we watched his video for Lorde’s Green Light). Abel also walks with a slow limp, presumably from the accident; he lipsyncs the lines of the song intehimthe Weeknd, while the women and the car seen behind him are blurry, out of focus. (I also wonder about how the women seem to be moving back and forth slowly – is the video using slow motion? or is it an effect of focal length?).

During the second verse of the song, the sense of dreamlike estrangement is increased. We see Abel in profile first from one side and then from the other; this would be a violation of continuity editing rules in a narrative movie, but as we have seen all semester, music videos operate according to a different logic. At one point there seem to be two people walking on the other side of the street, but they are so out of focus that we cannot tell anything about them. The camera rotates around Abel, and at one point the same woman shoves him angrily again (I find it hard to decide whether this means that she shoves him twice, or whether this is just a sort of reprise of what we saw a minute earlier, since our time sense seems scrambled by the overall slowness of the video). In any case, at the start of the second chorus, the car explodes in a ball of flame: this happens way in the blurry background, while Abel himself is close to, and faces, the camera, which moves backwards slowly just as he advances forward. Also, in between Abel and the car, we see the woman who shoved him moving back and forth pointlessly, a bit out of focus but sufficiently visible to suggest that she has lost her mind.

In the latter part of the chorus, there is a cut from in front of Abel to behind him; we see him leaving the street and approaching a large house. It is now darker than it was (a movement from dusk to full nighttime), and we can only see Abel’s profile against the house lights. When the song moves on to the bridge (with the ominous line “the hills have eyes” sung rather sweetly), we cut to a shot from inside the house, as Abel walks through the door. We see him from various angles walking through the house; first there is a room with a bluish tint, and then one where the incandescent lights are flickering. As the song moves on to a third and final reiteration of the chorus, Abel starts walking up the stairs. The light varies from shot to shot; it is mostly dim, but there are candles at one point, a reprise of the flickering lights at another, and a chandelier with imitation-flame bulbs at yet another. It’s mostly quite dim despite thes light sources, but there is a brighter yellowish glow in the background, seemingly coming from another room.

The very end of the song features a woman’s voice, gently singing a love song in Amharic (the language of Ethiopia, the country from which Abel’s parents emigrated to Canada shortly before he was born. He spoke Amharic at home as a child). You can read a discussion of this part of the song, and of The Weeknd’s Ethiopian heritage, here. Visually, we see Abel’s face illuminated in red as he enters a room on the top floor. The video cuts to a red-illuminated room, as the camera moves into it, coming ever closer to Rick Wilbur and two women sitting almost motionless on a couch. There’s a brief reaction shot of Abel’s bewildered face, and then another closer shot moving in on Wilbur and the women staring at the camera (and presumably at Abel). Wilbur holds an apple in his hand.

It is easier to describe what happens in the video, and what feelings it evokes, than to say anything about what the video means. Online commentators have tended to regard Wilbur as a devil figure; here the reddish room evokes Hell, and the apple suggests the Tempation and Fall in the book of Genesis. I wouldn’t say that such an interpretation is necessarily wrong, but it is reductive in that it fails to evoke the full uncanniness and sense of dream-like alienation that characterizes the video as a whole. I find it more interesting to see the video as a general portrayal of weird alienation: with eerily precise images (like the final ones of Rick Wilbur) and yet an overall sense of floating uncertainty.

Can’t Feel My Face is very different musically from The Hills; it’s an upbeat dance-oriented pop song, co-written by Max Martin (the Sweedish songwriter and producer who has worked with everyone from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift to Adele to Pink to Ariana Grande to Lady Gaga). The song has generally been interpreted as a love song to cocaine. That is to say, The Weeknd addresses the drug in the language that, in pop music, would conventionally be directed to a lover. But what he seems to love about the drug is, not so much that it gives him an ecstatic high, but that it makes him feel numb – this is meant both literally (cocaine has anaesthetic effects, so it might well blunt the skin sensations that one has in one’s face) and metaphorically (in the sense that he would become insensitive, not just to physical pain, but to the emotional pain that life often inflicts upon us).

The video for Can’t Feel My Face is a performance video, with a twist. It shows The Weeknd on a stage, performing the song at a club. The video starts with a closeup; The Weeknd moves into frame, his face mostly filling the screen, with a microphone before him. He sings the first verse and pre-chorus in this single, long-held shot. The lighting is interesting; first the background is blue, then, as Abel begins to sing, a spotlight illuminates his face, and then there is a shift from blue to read (we saw a similar color shift in The Hills). The curtain behind him has blue and red glitters, but it is out of focus.

All this changes when the song reaches the high-energy chorus (“I can’t feel my face when I’m with you…”). The video immediately cuts to a full-body shot of Abel performing on stage. We see him from a variety of angles, as he starts dancing, pulling the microphone along with him. His dancing is (by design) reminiscent of Michael Jackson, with energetic, but effortless-looking, side shuffles. Often these shots are well-lit, with everything in focus. But the shots of Abel’s performance are cut in with reaction shots from the audience. The audience members, in general, look less than enthusiastic – they aren’t really connecting with the energy of Abel’s performance. This is accentuated by the way that most of these reaction shots have the shallow focus, and bluish-reddish tints, of the early part of the video. One exception is a woman in the audience (the model Chanel Iman, who mostly smiles encouragingly at Abel, though at one point she rests her head in her hands in evident disappointment). In one of these reaction shots, Rick Wilder walks in and stis at a table. He looks intently at Abel, but most of the other reaction shots show disappointed patrons. One person in the audience throws their drink at Abel during the second chorus, and later he ducks to avoid being hit by some other indeterminate object.

Things change yet again when Abel reaches the song’s bridge: the music slows down, and he only sings “oooh, oooh, woo…” for a moment; this leads into a another reprise of the pre-chorus (“she told me don’t worry…”), but slower than before. Abel is no longer dancing across the stage, and we return to a closeup of him singing, with blurry and nuanced lighting (the sides of his face are lit up more than the face itself facing us, and a bright bar of yellow runs horizontally across the screen). In this moment of the music’s semi-pause, the closeup of Abel is intercut with shots of Rick Wilbur, who looks intently towards the singer as he lights a cigarette. Then he flicks the lighter again, and tosses it at the stage. We see the lighter arcing through the air, first in slow motion, and then accelerating (against an out-of-focus background with the same fuzzy blues and reds that we have seen before) as Abel draws out the last word of the pre-chorus: “alo-o-o-o-ne.” All of a sudden, as the music goes back to full speed for the final chorus, and the camera cuts to a longer shot of the singer’s full body on the stage, Abel bursts into flame. Now he is dancing more energetically than ever, shuffling back and forth all across the stage, and even doing a dive and slide across the floor. The camera alternates full-body shots and closeups, all emphasizing the flame; and we also get reaction shots of the audience, all of whom are now on their feet, enraptured, and energetically dancing along. The musical repetitions get more insistent, and we see Abel singing (lip-syncing) the backup to the chorus as well as the main vocal line. Finally, we get to a drop: everything in the music suddenly ceases except for the active bass line. As this plays, Abel jumps off the stage and moves forward, past the dancers in the audience, the camera moving backwards to keep up with him. All the while, he is still completely aflame. Finally he pushes out of the front door of the club. He comes to a halt facing into the camera, just as the music ends with a final “hey!”. Before everything goes black, we have a second or two in which it looks like the film itself is burning.

It’s evident that the video works as well as it does, at least in part because of how the cinematography and editing are carefully set up to interact with the musical structure of the song. Beyond that, the video wows us with the energy of The Weeknd’s performance (both singing and dancing). The flames can be seen as a metaphor for the way a performer “lights up” the audience, or for the way that his career takes off. Some online commentators have interpreted Rick Wilbur as representing the music industry, which gives the performer a big career boost, but at a severe price. If he was tempting The Weeknd, as a devil, in the first video, then here he seals the deal, and it is too late for the artist to withdraw. I don’t think this allegorical reading of the video is wrong, necessarily, but it is important to acknowledge as well the visceral impact of the video – both of the dancing/performance, and of the flames, which do have a strong emotional impact even though we know that they are really just a special effect. What does it mean to consume oneself, whether with a relationship, with drugs, or with performances to which one gives one’s all? (literally and not just metaphorically)?

Tell Your Friends, produced by Kanye West, is a song in which The Weeknd unapologetically speaks of his self-destructive lifestyle: “I’m that n**** with the hair/ Singin’ ’bout poppin’ pills, fuckin’ bitches…” The video is more straightforward visually than the previous ones in the trilogy, but it is just as symbolically charged. The video is set around dusk, and then at night, in an empty landscape. It starts, during the song’s instrumental introduction, with the camera tracking through the wasteland to a burning tree. The camera finally changes direction, swerving to the side to avoid the tree; just as the singing begins, the camera picks up a man from behind. He is briskly walking while carrying a shovel. We don’t see his head, but only his profile from behind, up to about chest level. He is wearing all black (The Weeknd’s signature sartorial style at this point in his career). His body is sikhouetted against the sunset. We finally get the first cut at about 0:33. The subsequent shots still don’t show us the man’s face or head, but we see him shoveling dirt from a small mound and tossing it into a hole. Over several shots, our perspective is changed, until the camera is located inside the hole. A man is buried there, his body encased in plastic; presumably he has been suffocated. Finally we see that Abel himself is the corpse. He lip syncs the song from within the plastic bag, even as the dirt is being shoveled over him. Just as the song finally reaches its chorus, the screen fades to black for a moment, then we see the man thrusting the shovel into the dirt, a sign that he has finally filled in the grave. The camera finally pans up to show us Abel’s whole body, including his head and face; this finally confirms (though we probably guessed it already) that The Weeknd is both executioner and victim. He has murdered and buried himself. Abel dances and lip syncs through the chorus and into the second verse of the song. These shots are intercut with shots of Rick Wilber coming to meet him. First we see just Wilbur’s feet; then his whole body as he walks from right to left on the screen (which by the conventions of continuity editing suggest that he is walking toward Abel in the contrasting shots); then we have face-on shots of Wilbur walking towards the camera. Towards the end of the second verse, Abel pulls out a gun, aims, and fires. The song is interrupted as the sound of the gunshot reverberates for something like ten seconds. As we hear this, we have a sequence of quick blackouts alternating with slow-motion, out-of-focus shots showing Wilbur’s body twisting from the bullet’s impact and falling down. (These blurry shots are the first ones in which we see both Abel and Wilbur in the frame at once). Finally, the music resumes with the second chorus. It has gotten much darker; sunset is over and night is coming. As Abel stands over Wilbur’s body, the camera tracks backward, away from them into the distance. Abel shoots the body a second time; again the song is interrupted and the screen goes black as the gunshot reverberates for something like eight seconds (both times, the reverberations obviously last for much longer than they would in actuality).

At this point, the song Tell Your Friends is interrupted. We never get back to hear the remainder of the song. Instead, Real Life — another song from The Beauty Behind the Madness — plays for the remainder of the video. It is now fully nighttime. The song opens with a sequence of power chords, separated by pauses. For each chord, we get a shot of The Weeknd walking slowly in the dark, with quick blackouts accompanying the pauses. He is going to his car, which stands in the middle of the field in the darkness, lights on. As the singing begins, Abel approaches the car; he does not lip sync. After the first two lines of the song, as we get a cut to inside the car, with the camera in the passenger seat, the song plays more softly and and with less bass and reverb: it is as if we were hearing it over the car radio. Abel gets into the car and drives off; we can barely see anything in the dark outside the window. When the song reaches the chorus, the video cuts to a shot through the windshield of the road the car is driving down, illuminated only by the headlights. After about sixteen seconds of this shot, the screen goes to black, and the music is cut off in the middle of the chorus.

The video as a whole is bleak, and it obviously lends itself to symbolic interpretation. The Weeknd first kills off an earlier version of himself, and then kills the demonic figure who tempted him and who fired up (both literally and figuratively) his career. This is not, however, followed by any sort of dramatic rebirth, but only by The Weeknd driving off into the night — or perhaps into the void. But as with the previous videos, what really makes it resonate emotionally is the careful cinematography and editing, and the way this meshes with the music. The video gives us two songs, both of which are interrupted and incomplete; it is organized around two confrontations, the Weeknd facing off against himself and against the Rick Wilbur figure. The video both begins and ends with long takes of the camera, in which we do not directly see the singer. In between, the editing is more rapid, but the flow of both music and images in interrupted by the gunshots and their aftermath. The only time The Weeknd seems at ease — the only time we see him lip syncing the song and dancing — is at the middle of the video, in between the two confrontations.

The Weeknd, In the Night (BRTHR, 2016) and Party Monster (BRTHR, 2017)

Both of the songs here could be described, not as love songs exactly, but as lust songs. In both, The Weeknd sings about women with whom he is obsessed. In the Night is another song co-written by Max Martin, and going for more of a pop vibe than The Weeknd’s other work. It seems to be about a woman who was traumatized earlier in life by sexual abuse; she is sexually adventurous, but not emotionally available (which is also how The Weeknd tends to describe himself): “When you wake up, she’s always gone…” Party Monster involves a collaboration with Lana Del Rey, who co-wrote the song and sings in the background during the break. The song seems to be about a stripper; The Weeknd wants her, and perhaps gets her, even though he doesn’t know her name, and she is involved with someone else: “woke up by a girl, I don’t even know her name.”

In any case, both videos are directed by BRTHR (Alex Lee and Kyle Wightman) in their inimitable high-octane psychedelic style. (We watched Party Monster, together with BRTHR’s videos for Selena Gomez and for Travis Scott, early in the semester). BRTHR’s editing style is dementedly fast. In both videos, we get a barrage of non-linear, metaphorical and associative images, plus flashbacks and flashforwards, as well as related ones that dissolve into one another. But this is not just a matter of rapid editing. The images themselves are heaviy computer-processed: they continually warp and morph and flash, or are overlaid upon one another, or have their colors altered, or are speeded up and slowed down. It becomes impossible to do something like count the number of shots and track continuity; rather, BRTHR seem to be inventing a new cinematic language, one whose post-processed flexibility cannot even be divided between cinematography (the capture of moving images) on the one hand, and editing (the arrangement of those images) on the other. Instead, we have a proliferation of flows and breaks, associations and dissociations, speedings up and slowings down, points of violent impact and involvement together with points of repose and detachment. The images have their own rhythms, and the effect of the video has a lot to do with how these visual rhythms interact with the sonic/musical ones: sometimes the relation is fairly straightforward, as cuts and dissolves match the beats, but other times it is much more complicated. (I have seen a number of recent videos by other directors, for other artists, that seek to do something like this; but most of them seem crude and unimaginative compared to BRTHR’s fluid density and flow).

In the Night has a lot of gangster-movie imagery, and suggests the bare bones of a narrative. The woman (played by the model Bella Hadid, who was in a relationship with Abel Tesfaye at the time) seems to be either a waitress or a stripper. She is held at gunpoint by a gangster who propositions her; but subsequently we see her and other women killing the gangsters, both with knives and by suffocation. Later, the lead gangster holds Abel at gunpoint and is about to kill him, but the woman shoots him first. Then Abel and Bella ride off in a motorcycle. Much of this plot is conveyed during interludes when the music drops out and is replaced by grating sound effects, ambient noises, and gunshots. There are three such sequences. The first one is right at the start of the video, a sort of pre-credit sequence in which we see gangster imagery, including a slow motion animation (much like “bullet time” in The Matrix) of a bullet fired from a gun, smashing through a plate of glass, and continuing through the air (this seems to be a flashforward of Hadid’s shooting the gangster towards the end). There is a second pause of the music in the middle of the video, when the gangster is kidnapping Bella. The third one comes as a sudden interruption when the gangster puts his gun to the back of Abel’s head. In between these sequences, as the music plays we see The Weeknd walking through nighttime city streets as he lipsyncs the song – first with neon lighting, and then also with an accompanying thunderstorm — we hear the thunder just as he moves to the first chorus. When the music ends, we see a number of additional shots over dissonant sound effects and final credits. These include one that I found so astonishing that I both freeze-framed it, and watched it over and over again (it lasts for about six seconds; there are two shots, one really close and one further away, and the second shot eventually dissolves): Bella seems to be drowned, underwater, yet on fire at the same time; she also seems to be floating upwards, even as rose petals (which float downwards, more as if they were falling in air than in water) fill the screen in between the camera and her.

The video for Party Monster gives us the song uninterrupted (after an opening sequence before the music begins), but if anything, its imagery is even more delirious. Abel drives through the desert in some shots, while in others he seems to be in some sex club. The video is awash with garishly oversaturated neon colors. The outlines of faces and bodies, as well as physical objects, become wavy and fluid. Light radiates out from Abel’s face and body. There are repeated apparations of flames and of Christian crosses. Eyes glisten with intensified light like in a horror movie; both Abel and a number of women find their faces melting like in another sort of horror movie. Many images are distorted with visual noise as if in old, analog video monitors. During the bridge, when The Weeknd (and Lana Del Rey in the background) sing the word “paranoid” over and over, a panther emerges three-dimensionally out of a TV screen and attacks The Weeknd – this image alludes to one of the freakier moments in David Cronenberg’s 1982 film Videodrome. The very next-to-last shot of the video stands out because it is the only shot in the entire video where the image is entirely clear, without distortions; it is a long shot of a car driving over a cliff and into the void – this image alludes to the ending of Ridley Scott’s 1991 film Thelma and Louise. The final shot, following this, is a closeup of The Weeknd, wearing sunglasses and looking at the camera (or perhaps, because of continuity editing rules that still retain their force even though they are not systematically used in this video, or indeed in most music videos,he is looking at what we just saw in the previous shot. The white of the desert sky is behind him, without distortion, but his face is still illuminated with a reddish-purplish glow.

The Weeknd, Call Out My Name (Grant Singer, 2018)

Call Out My Name, from The Weeknd’s My Dear Melancholy EP, is a slow and sad song, in 3/4 (or 6/8) time. It’s a break-up ballad, addressed to a former lover; only this time Abel is the one who was dumped, and feels let down and disappointed. (Online speculation is that the song refers to The Weeknd’s former relationship with Selena Gomez; see, for instance, here).

The video is directed by Grant Singer. There is a great ‘making-of video, where Singer discusses both The Weeknd’s performance and his use of special effects, here. The video starts straightforwardly, with The Weeknd alone on a deserted urban street, just as it’s getting dark. We see the streetlights turn on; everything is suffused in a dim darkish blue. Abel sings soulfully, first leaning against a lamppost and then walking down the center of the street. But when he gets to the chorus — “so call out my name” — suddenly a lot of bats get vomited out of his mouth. The CGI bats continue to swarm as Abel starts to dance, shuffling and kneeling as he continues to sing. A smooth cut with a match on action brings us to Abel still dancing, only now it is full nighttime, and the bats have vanished. There are a number of cuts and shots, and sometimes the image picks up lens flare from the streetlights (indicating, just as the bats did, the synthetic nature of the image).

The song, somewhat unusually, cuts from the chorus abruptly, while the melody and lyrics seem to be still unfinished (“I’ll be on my –“), to the second verse. Anticipating this switch, but a few seconds in advance of it, the video suddenly cuts to an entirely new location: an empty movie theater, dark except for the lit-up white screen. The Weeknd walks up some steps to the stage in front of the screen. When the second verse actually starts, we see him dancing in front of the screen — except that the camera starts turning vertiginously in a circle. Impossibly, every quarter rotation gives us another blank screen with Abel in front of it. Finally the camera stops rotating, and the screen behind Abel now has a black-and-white wilderness scene upon it. In a series of rapid cuts, the scene turns into color, Abel switches from dancing in front of the screen to actually being present in the landscape upon it, and we cut between Abel dancing in this landscape, and other shots of the landscape with wild animals posed in unusually positions as if frozen in mid-action (in the ‘making-of’ video, Singer references museum dioramas, and also talks about the special effect work that made it seem like one of the motionless animals blinked – a wonderfully creepy effect). We also get rapid flashback-like shots of Abel dancing both in the dark street, and in front of the blank white screen. There are also, even more weirdly, long distance tableau shots of Abel standing in the landscape, about in the middle of the screen, while towards the right side there is a nude woman, her skin very white, with a bird’s beak and birds’ talons instead of hands and feet (this is the horror film actress V Nixie). As the song moves towards the chorus again, the video cuts back and forth between images of Abel dancing on the nighttime street, Abel in front of the blank screen (with rotation), and tableaus of the wilderness area, with more frozen animals, fires, and the bird-woman. Something seems to gleam from her head, or from behind it.

The chorus once again seems to break just before it would have ended. There is no third verse, but an outro that consists mostly in instrumental reprise of the melody, with The Weeknd just singing “on my way” repeatedly in the background. Along with this, we get an entirely new visual sequence. Suddenly we seem to be in a futuristic, science-fictional spaceship. It is mostly white, with symmetrical rows of bumps all across the walls. In the center, at a far distance, there is an orange-rimmed circle. The camera spirals inwards towards the circle; due to the symmetry and rotation, and the general science fiction feel, I really cannot tell whether we are supposed to be moving horizontally, upwards, or downwards. We get close to the circle, and then enter inside it. There seems to be a rotating nebula inside the circle: it could be a spaceship nuclear furnace, though it also looks a bit like we are passing through an enormous eye. In any case, once we get through it, we break through clouds and see the scene beyond, which is an enormous apartment building, many stories high, with windows and balconies. We continue to zoom towards the building. Many of the balconies are festooned with clothes hung out to dry. (In the ‘making-of’ video, Singer talks about how he used both these clothes, and seeming reflections in the windows, in order to make the building – actually a miniature model — seem realistic). We zoom closer and closer to a balcony on which the bird-woman is standing, staring back at us. But before we reach her, there is a cut to the theater, the screen once again blank, and The Weeknd no longer dancing, but standing in profile in front of it. The camera zooms out, reversing its movement vis-a-vis the bird-woman, and quickly — as the song abruptly ends — cuts to black and the final credits.

No, I don’t have any symbolic interpretation of what all these strange images ‘mean’. Singer says in the making-of video that he prefers to keep meanings open and ambiguous; and his ideas for surreal moments seem intuitive rather than programmatically driven. The song/video is certainly both emotionally powerful in its expression of loss and longing, and disquieting in its odd displacements.

The Weeknd, After Hours video sequence: Heartless, Blinding Lights, After Hours (short film), In Your Eyes, Until I Bleed Out — (Anton Tammi, 2019-2020)

These five videos, all in support of The Weeknd’s 2020 album After Hours, form a sequence. Though each of them was released individually, at a separate time, together they make up a 22-minute continuous video that tells a story, more or less. How this narrative is different from a more conventional cinematic narrative, because it makes use of the special affordances of the music video format, is part of what I will discuss. But it should be noted that, because they are conceived together, the videos do not always match the lyrics of the particular songs. Four of the five videos present individual songs from the album; but the one in the middle, After Hours, does not actually feature the song of that title (a song that also gave its name to the album as a whole); instead, it is described as a “short film”, and uses snippets from the album together with other sounds. The videos are all direected by the Finnish director Anton Tammi, who conceived the entire sequence along with The Weeknd. You can read an interview with Tammi about the making of the videos — though done before the 5th segment was released — here.

Heartless is yet another song about The Weeknd’s difficulties with relationships — he is “heartless,” and after trying to be faithful to a particular woman, he always goes back to his old ways. The song combines a ballad melody with heavy beats. The video shows Abel in Las Vegas, together with Metro Boomin (the co-author and producer of the track). Abel is wearing a loud red suit jacket (as he does throughout all the videos in the sequence). The video emphasizes the garish lights of Las Vegas as the world’s entertainment Mecca. Abel is continually drinking, smoking, gambling, making out, and just smiling in bemused and stoned astonishment at the bright lights and overall ridiculous ornateness of the Las Vegas hotels. Often these shots are in slow motion; they also frequently use odd angles, or rotate upside down, so that we can see the ceiling lights and their reflection in Abel’s glasses. Sometimes the lights are in clear focus, other times they just provide a blurry background for Abel’s stupefaction.

A bit more than halfway through the video, we see closeups of Abel holding a toad in his hand, staring at it, and then slowly and lusciously licking it. This is a reference to the way that certain toads secrete psychoactive (LSD-like) substances on their skin. (As far as I know, this is only the case for certain species in the Amazon; you won’t actually get high from licking the skin of the sorts of toads you find in the USA). From this point on, the video becomes even more unhinged, presumably reflecting the mental state of Abel tripping. Abstract CGI hallucination patterns alternate with shots of Abel looking confused. He even hallicinates toad-like warts blossoming on his hands. For the last minute of the video, we see Abel running down a Las Vegas street, trying to outdistance a non-existent enemy, and then finally puking. (The puking can be a side-effect of many psychedelics, but here it also expresses the way Abel has paranoically reached the end of his tether). The last shot, after the music ends, shows him smiling, in extreme closeup, as his face morphs with wavy distortions; however horrible the experience, Abel still revels in it.

This video is evidently channeling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — both the 1971 book by Hunter S. Thompson, and Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film adaptation. Both book and film link the over-the-top garishness of Las Vegas with psychedelic drug distortions, implying that the latter is more a recapitulation and intensification of the former than some sort of counter-cultural rebellion against it. Las Vegas and LSD alike are grotesque expressions of the American Dream. The movie uses special effects to reproduce the bizarre hallucinations recounted in Thompson’s prose, and the video follows along with this line of expression. The Weeknd may be Canadian, but his heartless pursuit of excess, and the simultaneous self-loathing and self-congratulation with which he presents it to us, are American to the core.

Blinding Lights is a much more uptempo and dance-oriented track than Heartless, with lyrics expressing sexual yearning (“I can’t sleep until I feel your touch”). The video more or less picks up where the one for Heartless ended, although with a somewhat scrambled timeline. It opens with a 17-second extreme closeup of Abel’s bloodied face; he is smiling broadly despite being obviously messed up. We hear a swelling dissonant roar that eventually turns into the sound of helicopters overhead. Then, blackout and silence. A title card reading THE WEEKND. Then we are back to where Heartless ended, with Abel on a Las Vegas street. (His face is unbloodied, so we can presume the video’s opening shot was a flashforward). Street noise gives way to the opening music of the song. Abel staggers down the street, lunges at a pigeon, then stops and puts on black gloves. As the song’s beat kicks in, he walks to a parked Mercedes Benz convertible, gets in, and starts driving. The song title, BLINDING LIGHTS appears over the image. (Prior to video release, the song was actually used in a Mercedes Benz TV commercial. Even for big stars like The Weeknd, music videos rely on product placement and cross-licensing for part of their funding. The commercial is slick and snappy, and was evidently shot at the same time, but of course it omits the disturbing stuff from the video). In the first half of the video, there are lots of shots of Abel driving, fast and dangerously, around Las Vegas. There are closeups of the speedometer, of Abel screaming as he accelerates, of Abel lighting a cigarette, of the buildings and lights being passed by in a blur. These shots are gradually interspersed with others, with the time sequence somewhat scrambled: Abel in an empty hotel banquet room, Abel dancing ecstatically in the street with his face bloodied, and so on. Gradually, as we reach the chorus, there are more of the dancing shots and less of the driving shots.

Another image that starts intruding at this point is one of an Asian woman (played by the Japanese actress/model Miki Hamano), in a sparkling evening gown, singing (or about to sing) into a microphone. During the second verse of the song, we see a shot and reverse shot of them looking at one another; and then, in a series of wider shots, the woman points at Abel; and then, as she raises her arm, he magically rises several inches off the ground, and towards her. There are several more shots of them together, including a two-shot of their faces as they stare at one another in close proximity; but they don’t kiss, rather Abel’s cigarette, still in his mouth, creates a gap between them. The second chorus kicks in, and immediately the video cuts back to shots of Abel driving. For a moment or two, the song slows down and gets distorted as we get psychedelic shots of the road and city through the windshield, and of Abel sticking out his tongue (recalling the toad episode in the previous video). There’s a bit of car-engine noise, and then the song returns to its usual pitch and tempo.

The music is at its most upbeat and energetic, with the chorus, the bridge, and then another chorus, as we get an accelerated montage: shots get shorter, the camera becomes unstable, as we switch between shots of Abel’s increasingly erratic driving, shots of footsteps walking along a hotel corridor, and then a sequence of two big guys (gangsters? hotel security men?) beating up Abel. Everything in the hotel has a reddish tinge. There’s a closeup of Abel’s bloody face; during an instrumental reprise of the chorus, we see shots of Abel running out of the hotel and into the street, intercut with a few extremely rapid shots (driving, etc.) from earlier in the video. Abel dances down the street, followed by a shaky and unsteady camera. Reds alternate with greens.

Finally the camera holds still,as vocals return for the last time (another reprise of the chorus, but this could be called the outro). Abel is in the middle of the road, in a tunnel, dancing ecstatically, a smile on his bloodied face – at this point, the visual reference would seem to be Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker. The last line is, once again, “I can’t sleep until I feel your touch.” For the last word — “touch” — we see a quick insert of the Asian woman singing it into a microphone. Then, as the music fades out, the video ends with two relatively long-held shots of The Weeknd, face bloodied, but smiling triumphantly and dancing, standing on an overpass in the night, while out-of-focus traffic passes on the road beneath him.

The video is noteworthy for the way it shows us a number of narrative events, whose order we can discern (Abel driving; the Asian singer in the casino; Abel being beaten up in the casino; Abel running out of the casino and dancing in the street), and yet presents the sequence nonlinearly, with lots of shots that, in a traditional film, would have to be called flashbacks and (more unusually) flashforwards, and with editing patterns that are established rhythmically rather than in accordance with narrative logic. There is also no linking causal chain to explain the events: we are not told, for instance, why Abel gets beaten up. The video is a masterpiece of what I have elsewhere called post-continuity; with the proviso that music videos offer a far wider scope for such scrambled editing than narrative movies do — even when, as in this case, the video (and more broadly, the whole sequence of five videos) is in fact conveying a sort of narrative.

The After Hours short film continues the storyline without being keyed to a particular song. The Weeknd is still wearing that loud red suit; his face is still bloodied, and he wears a bandage over his nose. (Side note: a bandage over the nose can be incredibly disturbing in the movies, because the sight -or site – of the face is our main point of connection with the actors in a movie, and with the characters they portray. The bandage is a disfigurement which interferes with this process of emotional connection. The best example I know for this is Chinatown, in which Jack Nicholson wears an ugly bandage over his face for nearly half the movie). The video starts with an atonal roar, and darkness. But the roar resolves into applause, and the camera zooms out, revealing that we have been looking into the dark pupil of Abel’s eye. The Weeknd has just completed his performance on a nighttime talk show (Jimmy Kimmel – an actual live performance of Blinding Lights, for which The Weeknd appeared with red jacket, nose bandage, and spots of blood on his face).

In a single long-duration shot (nearly 50 seconds), we follow Abel backstage and through a number of corridors, until (with finally another cut) he steps through a door and out into nighttime Los Angeles. The applause has long since faded into a menacing atonal roar. We get closeups of Abel’s bloody face as he touches his bandage, then distant shots of him walking down the street as the title (AFTER HOURS) finally appears. The soundtrack mixes the noisy roar with melodic fragments from the album. Abel keeps looking behind himself anxiously as he descends an escalator into the subway. We get a long-held closeup of his face, then shots of him (both at normal speed, and then close and in slow motion) of him walking through the subway station. The soundtrack remains dissonant and vaguely ominous. A train is pulling into the station. Abel looks nervous and worried; at one point he yawns. At another point, he puts on his glasses and stares upwards, as he did during the psychedelic portion of Heartless. We get quick cuts, strobing lights, an abstract morphing pattern again like that from Heartless, and suddenly Abel is on the floor, being pulled all the way down the platform by an invisible force. This is a sort of scene familiar from any number of horror movies. The music gets more dramatic, the editing more frantic, with quick cuts between shots of Abel’s body being pulled while he tries to fight off the invisible force and then finally stumbling to his feet, closeups of his mouth opened in a scream, closeup of slats on the wall passing by quickly, with the camera sometimes rotating for added disorientation. Suddenly the music quiets down a bit and becomes ambient instead of overdramatic. We see a young man and woman coming up an escalator from the subway, arguing. An elevator door opens; Abel is standing motionless in the elevator. The couple, oblivious, get in. The elevator door closes. The camera stays still, as a red light begins to strobe ever more violently, until it is just an abstract pattern, while heavy dissonance on the soundtrack increasingly blends with the sounds of a struggle and of screaming. Then the screen cuts to black, and we hear low bass sounds…

The fourth video, In Your Eyes, picks up exactly where After Hours left off. The song itself is co-authored by Max Martin (and therefore relatively upbeat and dance-friendly, with its disco-ish beat, even though the lyrics are somewhat melancholy). We see the elevator doors open, and the arguing young couple enter; Abel is just standing there, as before. Then we get a shot from a different angle -from the mirror in the corner of the elevator, we see the couple from behind, and Abel between them holding a huge knife. Then more shots from outside the elevator; as the doors close, we see the knife in Abel’s left hand, and he begins to raise it up. Dissonant noise, and then a cut from the elevator door to a nighttime Los Angeles street. The young woman (Zaina Miuccia) enters the frame, blood on her face and clothes, and runs down the street. From here on, the visuals reference 1980s slasher films. We see shots of Miucca desperately running away, often stopping to look anxiously back, intercut with shots of The Weeknd — who, in contrast, is either standing still, or walking implacably after her. There are also closeups of the enormous knife. There’s a lot of play with the lighting. At one point, Miuccia is running down a street filled with steam. At another point, a bluish tinge while Miucca is trying to make a call on a pay phone, is contrasted with reds and strobing lights associated with The Weeknd. At the start of the chorus (“In your eyes/ I see there’s something burning inside you”) we get quick shots of both Miuccia’s and Abel’s eyes. We also get a short sequence (at approximately 1:19-1:25) of Miucca dancing in a club: this latter sequence is definitely out of time order (since it is only later in the video that she gets to the club; and in this shot, in any case, she doesn’t have blood on her clothes). This is a good example of how music videos, unlike regular narrative film, can violate causality and temporal sequence, even if they are also telling a story.

We return to more chase sequences, and more shots involving reddish, strobing lights. At about 2:08, Miuccia finally runs into the club that we previously saw earlier. There are green lines of laser light running across the room, but the dance floor overall is tinted with red light; this segment of the video plays powerfully with red/green contrasts. Miuccia, on the dance floor, looks back at Abel standing in ominous stillness; we get a series of shots and reverse shots of them looking at one another, the camera pulling closer into their faces each time. (It is noteworthy that these shots use the structure of eyeline matches in continuity editing, even though it is unclear whether the respective characters are actually being shot in the same physical space). When we get just to the verge of the second chorus (“in your eyes”) we have a succession of extremely quick shots; I cannot identify all of them, but they include a closeup of the knife, a closeup of one of Miuccia’s eyes, a closeup of Miuccia’s hands filled with blood, an abstract shot of what seems to be blood, and a closeup of the lower half of Miuccia’s face with her starting to scream. This is almost like an Eisensteinian montage (but I cannot imagine Eisenstein with the disco beat of this song).

As the song continues, we have additional shot-reverse shot setups with Miuccia among the dancers looking around, matched with Abel standing absolutely still, staring ahead of himself, with a background that is oddly decontextualized (it is unclear if he is also in the club, of if the editing here is simply rhythmic rather than naturalistic). In any case, after this we see shots of Miuccia looking around, then running through the club floor and into a corridor, and grabbing a do-not-break-except-in-case-of-fire glass cabinet in order to grab an axe. Just as the song is approaching the bridge, it slows down, gets deeper in tone, and then stops (like what might happen with an analog tape recorder). There are 45 seconds of Miuccia and The Weeknd stalking each other, with reddish-tinged light, while ominous dissonant noises and a vague musical tinkling play on the soundtrack. Finally the music resumes; we are back to the bridge. Miuccia keeps looking around herself while holding the axe. She sees Abel and screams; a quick cut, and the camera zooms into Abel’s face as he stands there; another quick cut, she is still screaming, and she decapitates him with the axe just as the music picks up for the final segment of the song, the post-chorus. The lighting is still all red. In another quick shot, blood spurts onto the wall. Miuccia picks up the head and stares at it, and we get another shot/reverse shot sequence of them (Miuccia and Abel’s head) looking at one another in extreme closeup.

All of this is still clearly referencing 1980s slasher films. A long stalking sequence is typical in such films; as is the plot resolution, when (everyone else having failed and been killed), the one remaining young woman (often called the “final girl”) finally succeeds in killing the male slasher. As film theorists from Carol Clover (who invented the phrase “final girl”) onward have shown, slasher films operate by playing with gender identification; the slasher’s murders actualize the structure of the dominating male gaze, while the slasher’s victims, both male and female, are “feminized” as passive objects of this gaze (and of the knife as its extension). But in the final moments of these films, our sympathies shift to the final girl, who becomes active instead of passive as she takes matters into her own hands and successfully fights back. The video knowingly references this dynamic, not only by parodically (though lovingly) recapitulating the gestures of such older films, but also in the way it shifts our attention from The Weeknd (who has been the center of attention throughout the whole sequence, as is typical for music videos) to Miuccia’s character.

This is perhaps why, even though we have gotten almost to the end of the song, the video continues for another minute and a half, through the post-chorus and an extended instrumental outro. However, this extended final sequence also brings us onto new and different emotional ground: we feel things that we would not feel from an actual slasher film, nor from hearing the song without seeing the video. We see multiple shots of Miuccia dancing with The Weeknd’s head. At first she still looks in shock; but as these shots go on, she becomes increasingly jubilant. Sometimes we see her dancing with the head alone, in the corridor where she killed him; sometimes we see her in the club, amidst all the other dancers – it is so late that it has now become daytime, and light is streaming through the windows; and then outside, dancing with the head and waving it around against a background of palm trees and the orange sunrise. There are some shots interspersed, just for variety, where she is dancing just by herself, or where she is waving around the axe instead of the head. But we keep on returning to shots where she holds the head tenderly as she dances, and stares into its dead eyes; or where she nuzzles it and almost kisses it; or where she holds it up like a trophy (as in traditional depictions, in Renaissance and Baroque art, of Judith holding the head of Holofernes). It is hard for me to describe the emotions I feel watching (and re-watching) this video, and especially this final stretch of it. If we were to take the plotline literally, we would have to say that Miuccia’s character has gone insane. But there is something wonderfully exhilarating about the sequence: it is moving and uplifting not in spite of, but precisely because of, the cognitive dissonance involved. This also involves the way I hear the song: there is all that push and pull between how the music implores you to dance, even though the lyrics express pain and vulnerability. There is no way that I would have imagined a slasher scenario just from hearing the song; but it seems to fit, it works, because of how we are drawn from feelings of disconnection (a relationship gone bad) to — something else.

Until I Bleed Out is the final video in the sequence (at least for now — it is also the final song on the album). It works as a kind of coda (since The Weeknd’s character was killed in the preceding video, we can see this one as sort of an afterlife; or, given the title, as a prolongation of the actual moment of death). The music is slow and sad, with only a weak beat — this is not dance music, but rather something like falling-into-a-stupor music. The video’s location is a party in some sort of swanky mansion. There’s a rotating platform, and the air is filled with confetti and balloons. Abel looks completely out of it; he stumbles around in a daze, and falls down several times. There are many shots of things rotating around in a blur. Some of the other partygoers seem to be pushing Abel around, for no discernible reason. Towards the end of the video, shots in the mansion are intercut with shots in which Abel seems to be stumbling around in a desolate outdoor area, at night, electrically lit in the distance. He falls down again, and the camera circles around him from above. There are more shots of the party, and of blurry rotations; then the video ends with a medium closeup of Abel, the background seeming to rotate behind him, and a cut to a brief shot of what looks like film disintegrating. The journey is over.

Moses Sumney, Worth It (Allie Avital, 2016)

Moses Sumney is a musician from California, the child of parents who immigrated to the US from Ghana. He currently lives in North Carolina. He often sings in a falsetto, backed by sparse instrumentation. Here is a recent interview. His music is quite original, pretty much unlike anyone else; and the same can be said for his videos: the earlier ones are collaborations with Allie Avital, and his more recent ones are self-directed. Worth It is an early song that appeared on his 2016 EP Lamentations. As for the video, I will only repeat here what I previously published:

Worth It is a collaboration between musician Moses Sumney and film director Allie Avital, the first of four music videos that they have done together. Avital sets stark, minimal visuals against Sumney’s brooding, multitracked falsetto voice and sparse instrumentation (consisting here only of hand claps and finger snaps). The lyrics are depressive: Sumney tells a prospective lover that he isn’t good enough for them, and they should look elsewhere. The video has no setting; it is only a dark nonspace, giving us figures without ground.

Sumney, clothed in black, emerges out of the darkness. A series of wavering cuts brings him closer, until his face fills the screen. In alternate shots, his hand reaches out towards the camera. Finally we get a reverse shot, more tactile than visual: the naked back of another human body (the dancer Martha Nichols). Sumney’s index finger hesitantly taps and traces a line down between her shoulders. In response, Nichols writhes back and forth; we see her muscles undulate. At this point, the video is almost an abstract study of the beauty of black people’s skin tones.

Gradually Nichols’ movements modulate into a full-fledged dance. She keeps her back to the camera, but twists around in wider arcs, and bends her head and torso ever further back. We find that, disturbingly, she has no eyes: just smooth flesh sealed over where they should be. All this is conveyed discontinuously, with cuts between closeups and even more extreme closeups. Nichols’ motion contrasts with Sumney’s near-immobility, as the video cuts rapidly between them. Eventually, Sumney cradles Nichols’ body in his arms, in a kind of inverse Pieta.

After a few more jump cuts, during which Nichols continues to writhe and twitch, her body softens into passive immobility. The camera now tracks smoothly back, away from the two of them. This continues for a while even after the music ends, until a final fade to black. The song/video is intense, immersive, and intimate; yet also implosive and claustrophobic. Human contact is inescapable and overwhelming, yet also nonreciprocal and uncommunicative. This is a truth about bodies and feelings, but also about the media environment that both sustains and isolates them.

Moses Sumney, Lonely World (Allie Avital, 2017)

This song also appeared on the EP Lamentations, and was reprised on Sumney’s first album, from 2017, Aromanticism (a reference to the condition of somebody who does not feel the emotions of romantic love). Lonely World is song about, well. loneliness. It partly consists in Sumney singing the word “lonely” over and over. He also mentions “the sound of the void… the void speaks to you/ In ways nobody speaks to you.” The instrumentation is sparse at first; Sumney’s voice is accompanied only by a jangly guitar. But as the song proceeds, the instrumentation swells, getting louder and louder until nearly the end; the instruments finally drop out, and the last thing we hear is Sumney’s voice a capella, still singing “lonely, lonely, lonely.”

The video is shot in gorgeous black and white. We see a bleak landscape: hills covered in rocks, with sparse vegetation. Sumney walks over these hills. First we see him in the distance, just a silhouette. Later shots bring him closer. Finally his body is close to the camera, and the landscape behind him is blurry, out of focus. His sharp outline and his dark skin contrast beautifully with the fuzzy grayness of the hills and rocks. The camera turns slowly around him. Then we cut to a POV shot of clouds and sky; a smoke trail shows something falling to Earth. We go back to Sumney’s head, with the blurry landscape behind him. The next POV shot shows a rocky area at the ocean’s edge; a female figure (Sasha Lane) seems to be struggling in a tide pool. She turns out to be a mermaid; a closeup shows us that her lips are sewn together. Sumney comes to her, leans down, takes off his sunglasses, and gently breaks the sutures over her mouth. She spits out water. Next, we see Sumney carrying her, and finally gently putting her down on the sand. Through all this, the camera, mixing shots from varying distances, continues its slow circular movements. There’s a continuing emphasis on the contrast between Sumney’s dark skin, the mermaid’s somewhat lighter (but still non-white) skin, and the greys of the blurry landscape behind them.

At this point, we are at the 3-minute mark in the song; we have reached the extended coda, dominated by bass and percussion, with Sumney’s vocals — “lonely, lonely, lonely” — buried in the mix. Sumney and the mermaid start to touch one another’s faces and bodies, first tenderly, then more insistently, until they are either making love or violently fighting — or both; it is hard to tell which, or when the first changes into the second. They roll over one another, and we see their mouths wide open in screams, which could be either orgasmic or painful (but we do not actually hear the screams, only the music). The editing becomes faster, with quick cuts and unsteady handheld camera movements. Finally the mermaid picks up a rock, and quite deliberately smashes it into Sumney’s head. (We have a motionless shot, held for several seconds, of her hand holding the rock as she stares angrily; but the actual violence occurs in a blur of motion (it seems to happen twice, as far as I can tell; but we don’t actually see the moment of impact). This happens just when the music becomes most intense. and horns come in to join the bass and percussion. The mermaid drags Sumney, by his throat and by the arms, towards the water; he is not dead yet, but he turns his head and stares at her uncomprehendingly as she pulls him under the waves. The instrumentation cuts out, and all that is left of the song is Sumney’s last murmured “lonely, lonely, lonely.” The video cuts to a longer shot of the waves hitting the shore. When the music ends, it is replaced by the gentle sound of waves hitting the beach; this sound continues for a few more seconds as the image fades to black.

I don’t think this haunting video can be reduced to any fixed interpretation. It’s more a matter of shifting mood, than of any specific meaning that could be attached to the figure of the mermaid, for instance. Sumney is altogether alone; the mermaid is too, as she comes from a different world. Their moment of contact is both desperately needy and disturbingly violent. The sadness of being alone compels them to approach one another; the mermaid is in agony from her landing, and Sumney feels impelled to help her. But the shock of contact, or perhaps I should say of enforced intimacy, is literally unbearable for both of them. Merging and separation are both painful; vulnerability and violation go together.

Moses Sumney, Doomed (Allie Avital, 2017)

This is another achingly beautiful song about loneliness, from the album Aromanticism. Sumney sings, mostly in falsetto, accompanied only by sustained (and presumably synthesized) tones, droning mostly in a very low register. The lyrics are self-questioning ones about the meaning of not loving anyone: “Am I vital/ If my heart is idle?/ Am I doomed?” The video shows Sumney floating, submerged in a glass tank of water. The camera roams around the tank; usually we see Sumney’s face, arms, and upper torso, but sometimes we see him from other angles — including a striking moment when we see the soles of his feet pressed against the glass. The watery interior of the tank is illuminated with a soft and spooky blue glow. Outside the tank is blackness; at one point, the camera moves away from Sumney’s tank, through the darkness, to another tank nearby, in which a woman is similarly suspended. Then it comes back to Sumney. All this seems to be a single take, until 3:40 or so, when the image slowly fades, to be replaced by another one, that seems to be taken from above the circular tank, instead of roaming along its sides. The fade/replacement is barely perceptible, because the lighting (blue surrounded by black) remains the same across both shots. For the last forty seconds or so of the video, the camera pulls back, or upwards, so that we see both Sumney’s tank and that of the woman next to him; and then, as the camera continues pulling back, we see a whole array of circular tanks, each with one human being inside. Spheres of blue, surrounded by black. The people are in fact close to one another, but each of them is isolated, shut off, unable to reach beyond their own enclosure, or to communicate in any way with one another. This final image is gorgeous and heartbreaking.

Moses Sumney, Quarrel (Allie Avital & Moses Sumney, 2018)

Quarrel is another song from Aromanticism. It somewhat more lush and full in its instrumentation than any of the songs we have heard previously. The lyrics seem to be about the impossibility of communication among people who are not on equal footing. The person (a lover?) with whom he is at odds has “the privilege to ignore” their disagreement; but he doesn’t. “Don’t call it a lovers’ quarrel,” Sumney sings; “We cannot be lovers/ ‘Cause I am the other.”

The video is strange and oblique. It is set in the winter, with snow on the ground. It is wide screen. In some shots, the colors are muted; in others, a glow from the sun gives warmth to what remains a limited palette. After the establishing shots, from a distance and from up in the sky looking down on the ground, we see shots of Sumney and a horse. He cuddles and caresses the animal, as the camera circles swooningly around them. He stands in a barn facing the horse, and dances for it. The horse trots in slow motion in a circle aroudn him. In all these sequences, the camera placement and movement work to suggest some sort of romantic engagement between Sumney and the horse.

But then we see Sumney walking alone through the dark, and entering a building with a strange assemblage that seems to be made of the bodies of dead horses trussed up in a frame in some way. This is an actual sculpture, made in part from horse carcasses: No Life Lost II, by the Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere. There is an article analyzing the sculpture here, which suggests that this sculpture “is provocative precisely because of that tenderness: it forces us to look directly at abjection, at death, and to find beauty in it.”

Sumney takes out a small knife and seems to be working on it, as if he were the sculptor. The horse comes to the door, looks in and sees it. Sumney and the horse exchange glances; he stands in front of it, distressed, with his head bowed. The horse walks away; Sumney runs after it. As before, the editing and the exchange of glances imply an erotic relationship between Sumney and the horse: but here, a rupture and a disappointment. Sumney stands in the barn, looking abashed before the horse, who looks back in a reaction shot. At this point, the song proper ends, and the video fades to black.

But there is still more music: after a brief pause, we hear a two and a half minute instrumental coda. The camera, as at the start of the video, moves over the winter landscape from high in the sky. Then the video cuts to an odd tableau. Four horses stand in a circle around a kind of wooden trestle, from the middle of which Sumney hangs suspended, with a harness around his chest and shoulders. The camera spins slowly towards and away from the structure, cut together with closeups of body parts of the horses, as well as of Sumney’s face. Not only is his body a few inches off the ground, so that he swings slowly back and forth, but his arms have been replaced by horses’ legs, ending in hooves. The last shot of the video, lasting for a whole minute, starts at a point above Sumney’s body and the trestle, and then slowly ascends higher in the sky, and also circles slowly around, until the whole tableau, Sumney and horses, grows small from distance; we mostly see the figures’ shadows rather than the figures themselves. During this shot, the music is dominated by a piano, as the drums fade out. Finally, the music ends, and the shot fades to black.

Once again, there is no easy and unambiguous way to make sense of this video. It is beautiful and disturbing. Sumney’s previous videos and songs are about isolation and disconnection; this one seems to be on a similar theme, but it is changed by focusing on the interchange between a human being and a nonhuman animal (though horses have had a long relationship with us, for thousands of years). The video also asks us to question the relation between life and art; the sculpture is designed to express empathy, but it also objectifies the dead bodies of which it is composed. Does the last part of the video suggest an inversion, as Moses Sumney becomes a sculptural object for the horses?

Moses Sumney, Virile (Moses Sumney, 2019)

Virile is the first single from Sumney’s 2020 album grae (the reference is to the color gray, as in: neither black nor white). The song rejects the mainstream social conception of masculinity: “You wanna slip right in/ Amp up the masculine/ You’ve got the wrong idea, son.” He also sings of his awareness of mortality, which makes “virile” masculine postures ridiculous: “none/ Of this matters/ ‘Cause?I will return/ To dust and matter.”

As for the self-directed video, Sumney writes that it “takes place in a post-human world, the last remaining man is caught between Beauty and Brutality’s battle to dominate the earth and his body.” The overall look of the video isn’t as science-fictional as this description might imply; but it is definitely strange and alienating. The opening shot shows Sumney lying on the ground, amidst dried grass. The camera is way up in the sky, and the sound is indeterminate ambient noise; then the camera moves in on Sumney, while on the soundtrack we hear harps and a tinkling piano, and Sumney’s voice crying out wordlessly: “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah…” After this, once Sumney starts actually singing, most of the video shows him dancing solo in what seems to be a meat locker. The lighting is indirect, and mostly coming from way back; there is also smoke in the air (or perhaps, given that this is a meat locker, it is evaporating dry ice). Giant slabs of beef hang on hooks. Other slabs are moved back and forth; Sumney enters between the slabs, hanging from above as they do. He jumps off the pull-up bar to which he had been clinging.

The sound thickens; guitar and drums come in after a while. Sumney engages in a furious dance. His chest and torso are bare; below them he wears loose black pants. His dark skin glistens. The camera is far enough away to show either his whole body, or his body from the waist up. His body pulses and writhes, as if he were both trying to free some energy trapped inside him, and yet also trying to bottle the energy up and prevent it from escaping. I would not quite say he is expressing anguish – his facial expression does not really convey this, though he looks tense and intent; but his whole body does seem to be taut and tightly wound up. Occasionally his back is to the camera; we see his shoulder muscles vibrating with tension, in a way that is reminiscent of Martha Nichols in Worth It.

When the song reaches the second verse — in which Sumney sarcastically sings, “To stake dominion over all that one surveys/ Is the virile, viral way” — he moves into another room. This room is set up like a religious chaper: there are rows of seats on both sides of a central aisle that leads to a kind of altar, swathed in red. Candles are burning on the altar, but to both sides of it there are giant slabs of meat hanging. Is this a site for the worship of meat-eating and masculine violence? The camera moves down the aisle towards the altar, as Sumney writhes in front of it. Then the camera moves back and away; there’s a sudden cut to a metallic wall lit in blue, against which Sumney is now dancing. We get extremely brief jump cuts back to the red room, though mostly we see Sumney against the wall in blue. These violent disjunctions of the image correspond to the musical ferocity of the second chorus, with raving guitar and heavy drums. Finally we get a shot of the entire blue room; it contains more meat, hanging from hooks and lying on a long work table. As the chorus continues — “you’ve got the wrong idea, son” — Sumney skips across the room in boxer’s pose, fists clenched as if he is going to punch out the meat. The camera follows him, in swift, jerky motions across frequent cuts. But then Sumney crouches before one of the slabs of meat, seeming to caress it. When he gets back up on his feet, his right hand and arm all the way to the elbow is covered with some blue, glittery substance. The camera backs out of the room, and as it does so, the room lighting changes from blue to red (like that of the “chapel”). The room has no door, but it is separated from the rest of the space by hanging plastic strips (such as are often used at the edge of a refrigerated area). The camera, looking through these strips, shows us the silhouette of Sumney dancing just behind them, still in the (now red) room. All this takes place during the song’s bridge with its accusation against masculine imperialism: “You want dominion to make minions of the stars,/ Made up of what you are…” The word “are” is repeated many times.

While the stream of “are”s continues, we cut from the meat locker to a long shot in which the camera rapidly moves over a landscape, mostly dry grass with a sparse sprinkling of trees. When the instruments suddenly drop out, so that for a moment we just hear Sumney’s voice once more reciting wordless “ah”s, there is a cut to an extreme closeup of meet, with beetles crawling over it. Then full instrumentation resumes, for the last reprise of the chorus; and we cut back to the outdoors. We see Sumney running along a path; we see, from high up in the sky, his running as the path turns in a loop. Then the camera, from somewhat closer in, circles around Sumney as he dances in place. The sky behind him is filled with an ominous, spiraling insect swarm (evidently CGI). There are a number of quick jump cuts as Sumney dances ever more frantically, and the swarm fills more and more of the sky. Just as the singing ends, and the music fades out, we cut to a shot of Sumney lying on the ground, breathing heavily as if exhausted. His breaths are very loud on the soundtrack. An enormous mass of beetles (like the ones on the meat earlier) are crawling all over his face and torso. The camera slowly moves closer and closer to his face, with the bugs in disgusting profusion. Then we get a cut to black, though the heavy breathing continues for a few more seconds.

As with so many of the videos we have looked at all semester, I do not think we can ‘translate’ it by giving a single symbolic meaning to each element. The video’s emotional power comes from the accretion of details, both in the music and in the visuals. Evidently Sumney is at war with conventional social ascriptions of the meaning of masculinity, which impose themselves both on his mind and on his body. If his dance enacts the conflict between Beauty and Brutality, it is because escaping from the latter involves so much struggle. We are continually reminded of death and carnivorous predation: we have taken life from the animals now reduced to slabs of meat, and this violence is almost our implicit religion, as the “patriarchs” seek to impose violent “dominion” (both of these words coming up at crucial moments in the song). It’s a struggle of life against death, or against the violent putting-to-death that characterizes hegemonic masculinity and virility. But life itself is finite; it can be exhausted, and it gives way to death, which in turn nourishes new life (like the beetles that consume inert flesh). All these ideas are expressed in the course of Sumney’s dancing and the video’s overall cinematography; though never in such form that they could be congealed in any cut-and-dried single statement. We are left, uncomfortably, with a high degree of ambivalence.

Moses Sumney, Cut Me (Moses Sumney, 2020)

This is Sumney’s latest video, also for a track from grae. I haven’t yet watched it often enough to have as developed a sense of it as I do for the earlier videos. The song is unusually bouncy and upbeat for Sumney in terms of sound. The instrumentation is more conventional than is the case for many of his songs, with a snappy bass line and horns and choruses reminiscent of soul music. Even Sumney’s voice sounds warmer and more relaxed than usual, though it still displays its awesome range. The lyrics seem to be about (both literal and more metaphorical) masochism; but even the words and rhyme scheme are more playful than is the case with many of his other meditations: “when my mind’s clouded/ And filled with doubt/ That’s when I?feel?the most alive/ Masochistic?kisses are how I thrive…. seemingly I need/ what cuts me, cuts me…”

The video is dance-based, and all the visuals are articulated with a clipped precision. But the video is also upbeat, even comedic, in a way that none of his earlier ones were. Sumney himself says of the video that it is “a satirization of the medical industrial complex, and a chuckle in the face of black death.” Sumney appears as a patient; we first see him wearing an oxygen mask. (Is this a nod to the current coronavirus crisis?) There are two other dancers in the video, Emara Jackson and Malachi Middleton, who appear as paramedics driving an emergency ambulance. They are dressed in reddish hospital gowns; Sumney first appears in one as well, but for the most part he wears his usual black. We see the three of them in a series of slightly absurd and surreal dance routines: alternately sitting up and lying down in hospital beds, for instance; or loping down a hospital corridor with Sumney in the center, his arms over the shoulders of the others who are supporting him. We also see tableaus of the three of them in their underwear, swaying softly as they lean back into one another, or all writhing slowly on the floor in what I can only describe as a pseudo-orgy. Then there are the shots of Sumney dancing or bowing on a stage, his body jerking as if pulled by puppet strings, while in the reverse shot the other two sit in an otherwise empty auditorium, holding up cards rating Sumney’s performance like gymnastics judges at the Olympics. And then there are the shots of one or the other of them dancing on top of a coffin. The video ends with Sumney riding on the roof of an ambulance (marked “Sumney County”) as if it were a horse. All in all, the video is quite beautiful; and it shows the same elegance and precision of Sumney’s other videos (whether directed by himself or by Allie Avital). But its light touch (echoing the upbeat lightness of the song, despite its potentially depressing subject matter) makes for a lovely contrast with Sumney’s other videos, and (dare I say it?) gives us a kind of hope that is more than welcome in this time of deadly pandemic.

Solange, When I Get Home (Solange, 2019)

This extended video, or short film, accompanies Solange’s album of the same title. The music can perhaps be described as jazz-inflected soul; it is unusually fragmentary for a major album release, with bits and pieces of songs, riffs, samples, and bass lines weaving in and out. The music, and especially the lyrics, work to portray African American life and culture in Solange’s home town of Houston, Texas.

The video includes most of the music from the album, and inherits the music’s fragmentary structure. Solange is the overall director, but she also credits a number of co-directors: Terence Nance (director of the film An Overestimation of Her Beauty, and co-creator of the TV series Random Acts of Flyness), Alan Ferguson (Solange’s ex-husband; we have already seen some of his videos for Janelle Monáe and for Beyoncé), Jacolby Satterwhite (a multimedia visual artist who did the animated sequence of When I Get Home), Ray Tintori (who has directed music videos for MGMT, Arcade Fire, and other bands), Autumn Knight (a multimedia performance artist), and Robert Pruitt (a visual artist based in Houston). As this list indicates, Solange works with an eclectic group of collaborators, including people from the art world as well as from music and film.

All in all, this video is a lot more abstract – and therefore harder to talk about – than most of what we have seen over the course of the semester. Solange is more interested in moods and patterns than she is in telling a story. We do see some fascinating iconography in the course of the video: I am thinking especially of the African American cowboys, people who really existed and still exist, but have been largely written out of history and of such contemporary manifestations as the rodeo. One of Solange’s goals is clearly to rescue this forgotten history, and to show the role of black people in Texas (especially Houston) in all areas of history and culture. The video is shot at locations ranging from the downtown Houston skyscrapers to the homes of the Third Ward, the mostly African American neighborhood in Houston where Solange and her sister Beyoncé grew up, to rural settings,including that circular arena where a lot of the dancing takes place.

Although there are lots of shots of Solange by herself, much of the dancing is ensemble-oriented. There are many groups of dancers executing repeated patterns. Moving around in a circle is an especially prominent motif; lines of people moving in opposite directions is another. The film, like the album, is intercut with casual scenes from everyday life. There are also a lot of still shots, both of Solange, and of the dancers and of other Houstonians.

Solange, Cranes in the Sky and Don’t Touch My Hair, (both Solange and Alan Ferguson, 2016)

These two videos are both from Solange’s previous album, A Seat at the Table. Cranes in the Sky is a melancholy song about loss and trying to dull the pain. The video is an extraordinary series of shots of Solange in striking architectural or landscape settings. Sometimes she is alone, at other times she is with one or a number of other black women dancers. These figures in their surroundings almost form tableaus; the movement of the dancing is subtle and restrained, and nearly always in place.

Don’t Touch My Hair is similarly musically gentle and restrained in its dance movements. But it is fuller (less minimal) than Cranes in the Sky, and restricted to architectural settings. Sometimes Solange is close to the camera, but other times we see her from a good distance, and sometimes from above. In the chorus, Solange duets (in both singing and dancing) with Sampha, an interesting singer/performer/composer in his own right. You can also check out Sampha’s beautiful video for his own song (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano (Jamie-James Medina, 2017).

Solange, Sandcastle Disco (Solange, 2008)

This is a much earlier song and video by Solange. It isn’t as artistically nuanced as her later work, but I love it for its evocation of Motown, and its playful, ultra-low-budget special effects (Solange on the turntable and on the various instruments, and with the Warhol soup cans; the multiplication of her figure; the rainbows and stars and notes and balloons; and especially, for some reason, the elephant in the background at the end).

Earl Sweatshirt, Chum (Hiro Murai, 2013) and Grief (Hiro Murai, 2015

Earl Sweatshirt (legal name Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) was originally part of the Odd Future crew, which also included such subsequently successful artists as Tyler the Creator, Frank Ocean, and Syd the Kid.

Chum is a bleak and negative song, with its autobiographical details and its recurring refrain “Something sinister to it.” The video matches this bleakness; it is shot at night, and everything is dark. There are lots of closeups of Earl as he raps; often he is just backlit so we can’t see his face very clearly despite how close we are. There are also times when the camera tilts, and sequence where the street behind Earl is upside down (actually, according to an interview with Murai, the sequence was shot with Earl himself hanging upside down, and then the image was inverted). Sometimes Earl’s face briefly transforms into a skeleton mask; we also see shots of the drummer, from behind, wearing an inverted skeleton suit. The shots of the nighttime street are sometimes surreal, as when a grocery cart in flames passes by. There are also images of a frog croaking (including one where it seems to be enormous, and fillng the street). Murai says, in the interview already cited, that “my least favorite thing on the planet is when we release a video and blogs have a synopsis of what happens, because to me what happens in the video isn’t really the point. It’s more of a tone thing, or you should just experience it in conjunction with the music.” So we shouldn’t think that the frog, or the sight of Earl floating, means something specific; for Murai, “yes, that happens in the video, but it isn’t what it’s about.” To my mind, the point is always to figure out the rhythms and the emotions of the video; that is what I am trying to do here.

Grief is another downbeat song, in which Earl raps about his difficulties (with alcohol and drug addiction among other things), and his efforts to escape them. Earl raps over a grinding, sludgy, repetitive riff. “I just want my time and my mind intact/ When they both gone, you can’t buy ’em back.” The video is shot with a thermal imaging (infrared) camera; images from such devices are usually converted to false color, but Murai renders it all in black and white. The result is to give everything a murky and unreal air, as if we were in a ghost world. We see Earl sitting on a couch and smoking a blunt, sometimes in extreme closeup, and other times from far away so that he seems isolated in the darkness. We also see other people looming like ghosts in the distance, and a woman who dives into a pool and then emerges with water dripping down her face. There are also images of a snake (Earl raps at one point, “all I see is snakes in the eyes of these n****s”), and flashes of heat from the flames of a stove or of Earl’s lighter. Murai gives some details on the making of the video here: “I wanted the whole video to feel like you’re wading through black oil… The song has a thick, mucky production, so a lot of the specifics of the video derived from that.”

Earl Sweatshirt, Nowhere Nobody (Naima Ramos-Chapman and Terence Nance, 2019)

This is an experimental short film, built around fragments of songs from Earl Sweatshirt’s album Some Rap Songs. Ramos-Chapman and Nance are the creators of the amazing Afrocentric TV series Random Acts of Flyness (originally on HBO; also viewable on Amazon, Apple and other streaming services; it is definitely worth checking out). The video is enigmatic, though Ramos-Chapman gives some indications about what it is doing here. I notice the contrasts between motion and stillness, as well as between documentary footage and fiction (including surreal images of blood leaking from the ceiling), and between life (people, plants) and art (the statues). We see Earl coaching a teenaged basketball team; we see him sitting in his bathtub; though most of the sound is asynchronous, we see him lip-syncing a bit as well. There are references to his late father (a South African poet and anti-apartheid activist), and appearances by his mother (Cheryl Harris, a law professor). The video is also filled with shots of white plaster(or ceramic? I’m not sure) statues, mostly busts and hands (the busts are of black people; the contrast of white and black is another one of the film’s dualities). At one point, we see a black man with white painted over much of his body so that he resembles a statue. At another point, we see a casket entirely filled with statue hands. Earl and others perform tasks (like clearing vegetation off the statues) with white plaster hands that they hold in their own hands. There is also a strange mirror scene, in which Earl is doubled and mimicked by a female lookalike, LaDiamond Blue. All in all, the images are both quite definite and sparse; the video is composed of contrasts, but there is no single key to what it all means.

Tierra Whack, Mumbo Jumbo (Marco Prestini, 2017) and Unemployed (Cat Solen, 2019)

Tierra Whack is a young rapper from Philadelphia. Both of these videos offer us horror movie themes: grotesque to the point of queasiness, but also kind of funny. Mumbo Jumbo contains very few words; for the most part, Whack is just rapping nonsense phrases over the slow, hypnotic riff that grounds the song. The song has been taken as a parody of so-called “mumble rap,” though Whack has denied this. The video portrays a visit to the dentist, which was perhaps suggested by the song’s non-words (when the dentist is doing things in your mouth, you cannot really speak articulately). The video works by means of the tension between how creepy everything is, and yet how formally static (and even stilted) its look is. Everything is symmetrical, and there is a careful minimalistic color scheme (mostly white, with contrasting red). The dentist and assistant, the receptionist, and the waiting patients, are either slow-moving or entirely motionless. Even the grossest details (the drippling blood, the gigantic cockroach) look carefully designed, and carefully placed in the frame. The result of the dentistry – the impossibly broad smile – is almost nauseating to look at; and this is only accentuated at the end of the video, when Whack emerges into a post-apocalyptic landscape in which all the derelicts and sick people have the exact same hyper-smile. The video is reminiscent of some of the earlier films of David Cronenberg (and even more of teh 2012 film Viral by Cronenberg’s son Brandon Cronenberg).

If Mumbo Jumbo makes you never want to go back to the dentist, Unemployed may make you hesitate before you eat a potato ever again. How do you feel, as a chef or a server, already trapped in a position of servitude, when the food talks back to you? Low-budget animations are enough to make this creepily hilarious.

Tierra Whack also recently released a self-made coronavirus quarantine video, #STUCK, based on a song by Alanis Morrisette, but with Whack’s new lyrics. It is quite charming and you can find it here.

Tierra Whack, Whack World (Thibaut Duverneix, 2018)

This is Tierra Whack’s first album: 15 songs, each a minute long, and each with its own video. The individual songs and videos are this length because that is the time limit for videos posted on Instagram; but in addition to placing each of the separately on Instagram, Whack posted the entire album as a suite on YouTube and other platforms. The whole set makes for a dazzling experience; it hangs together, even though each song displays a different mood, and features Tierra Whack in different clothes and hairstyles. All in all, it is a kind of virtuoso display, ranging from depression to exultation, and from segments where we only see her fashion nails, or her face swollen by her allergic reaction to insect bites, to a mini-exercise video and one where she stares at the camera through a complicated apparatus of distorting lenses. I will not say more here, because I wrote and published an entire essay on Whack World, which is open access and downloadable here.

Beyoncé, Lemonade (Beyoncé, Kahlil Joseph, et al., 2016)

This is the only viewing in the entire semester for which I don’t have a free link. This hour-long video (or short film, or “visual album,” as Beyoncé herself calls it) is not available on YouTube or Vimeo, but only (as far as I can determine) on for-pay music streaming services (like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal). But it is such a powerful and important work that the class would not make any sense without it. Beyoncé combines music videos for every song on her album of the same name together with bridging passages, in order to form a complete single work. (She had previously released her eponymous 2013 album as a visual album, with music videos for every track; but the videos, like the songs, were each entirely separate). Though the video as a whole tells a story of loss and redemption, it is not a narrative in any traditional cinematic sense; Beyoncé seems to have invented an entirely new genre of work, one that defies ready definition. Of course, like just about all music and video work today, Lemonade is an immense collaboration; many peope contributed to its making. Besides Beyoncé herself, the most important collaborators are Warshan Shire (a British-Somali poet) whose words are adapted for the bridging passages between the songs, and the director Kahlil Joseph (who has also directed videos for Flying Lotus, Shabazz Palaces, Kendrick Lamar, and FKA twigs).

Supposedly a director’s cut of Lemonade exists, that is entirely the work of Kahlil Joseph; but this has only been shown a few times, in museum settings. Beyoncé subsequently replaced some of Joseph’s work with videos for particular songs by other directors (though as far as I can tell, Joseph is still responsible, together with Beyoncé, for the overall structure of the work). Each segment – bridging material plus song – has its own title, which is separate from that of the song. Here is a listing of the sections of the video; both the name that flashes on screen and the name of the song; in cases where I have been able to find the credits, I have also listed the directors of the particular videos:

1. Intuition – Pray You Catch Me – ???
2. Denial – Hold Up – Jonas Åkerlund
3. Anger – Don’t Hurt Yourself – ???
4. Apathy – Sorry – Kahlil Joseph and Beyoncé
5. Emptiness – Six Inch – ???
6. Accountability – Daddy Lessons – ???
7. Reformation – Love Drought – Kahlil Joseph
8. Forgivenesss – Sandcastles – Mark Romanek
9. Resurrection – Forward – ???
10. Hope – Freedom – ???
11. Redemption – All Night – Melina Matsoukas
12. (a separate song) – Formation – Melina Matsoukas

I should also note that I find it very difficult to write about Lemonade, among other reasons because so many people have written about it already, many of whom know the ins and outs of Beyoncé much better than I do. In fact there is an entire book of essays on Lemonade: The Lemonade Reader, edited by Kinitra D. Brooks and Kameelah L. Martin. With your Wayne State ID, you have unlimited access to this volume; you can either read it online, or download it in whole or part. It is worth at least looking through this volume, and reading whatever parts of it catch your interest. Simply go here. You can also read — this one is open access, so you do not need a Wayne State ID to reach it — an illuminating discussion by three music video critics here. In another open access article, Carol Vernallis puts Beyoncé’s work in the larger context of the history of music video here.

In any case, Lemonade links (apparent) autobiographical material with broader issues. The immediate subject matter is taken to be the infidelity of Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, her anger over this, and their eventual reconciliation. Consider the second song, Hold Up, in which Beyoncé, dressed in a bright yellow gown, and wielding a baseball bat, smashes up cars, shop windows, and security cameras. The song is upbeat, and Beyoncé’s expression is joyful more than angry. She is shown doing all this damage in slow motion, while fires and floods break out behind her, and passers-by look on in amazement. The song’s lyrics suggest a movement back and forth between anger and willful craziness, even as everything revolves around the reproach: “what a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you.”

At the same time, the song and video suggest wider contexts than just the autobiographical one. In the video for the previous track, “Pray You Catch Me,” we see Beyoncé underwater; at the start of Hold Up, she comes out of the front doors of a house, and water gushes out behind her. Symbolically or mythologically, this suggests a movement of (re)birth. Several of the articles in The Lemonade Reader suggest that the iconography of the video contains references to the orisha Oshun, the goddess associated with love and sensuality, and also rivers and other bodies of water, in Afrodiasporic religious practices like Santeria and Voudun (originally part of Yoruba mythology, brought to the New World by enslaved Africans, and maintained by practitioners ever since). This gives Beyoncé’s personal drama a much broader resonance in African American history.

Similar references are maintained throughout Lemonade, despite the widely different musical and cinematic styles of the various segments. During the song Freedom, we are given a connection to the Black Lives Matter movement, as we see the mothers of young black men who were murdered by cops or security guards holding pictures of their sons. Many sections show Beyoncé surrounded by other black women, whether dancing or just standing in formation (to use the word from the song of that title). These shots emphasize solidarity and survival despite a long history of oppression. There are many shots of plantation buildings and grounds from the Old South. Often we see black women wearing 19th-century clothing; they have come to inhabit and take over for themselves the locations in which their ancestors were enslaved. Other times, we see black women dancing or riding on a bus with traditional African face markings and adornments. The continuity among generations is reinforced with interpolated family videos: in the latter parts, which deal with reconciliation and redemption, we see intimate moments between Beyoncé and Jay-Z; Jay-Z playing with their daughter Blue Ivy; and, during the song Freedom, footage from a family gathering in which Jay-Z’s grandmother, celebrating her 90th birthday, says the familiar line about making lemonade when life gives you lemons — thus giving the album its title.

These are just a few of the many ways in which the Lemonade visual album combines personal expression, family history, the broader history of African Americans, and spiritual references. The music is surprisingly diverse, ranging from rap to rock to soul ballads to even a country music number (“Daddy Lessons” – as we have mentioned earlier in the semester, though country music is conventionally regarded as a white musical genre, in fact, like nearly all other kinds of American popular music, it has extensive African American roots as well). The album is also stunningly diverse visually: it combines color and black-and-white, wide screen and narrower aspect ratios, vibrant footage and grainier sequences that either simulate, or actually come from, older media forms. But there are also continuing visual motifs that recur throughout the video, linking these heterogeneous forms: fire and water, lavish old-fashioned interiors, and so on. Moreover, though the video has a clear progression in terms of its expression of feelings and moods, this is accomplished without anything like a traditional cinematic narrative. There are no characters in the usual movie sense. Beyoncé plays herself, more or less, moving between explicit performance and represented fictional situation. Her family — husband, daughter, and parents — makes appearances, as well as various celebrities (from Serena Williams to the mothers I mentioned above). But whatever may have happened in Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s marriage, nothing is literally dramatized. We have, in effect, a series of tableaus whose music and visuals and lyrics (not just song lyrics, but also the spoken poetry from Warshan Shire) convey a wide range of moods and historical references; but they do not tell a story in any conventional sense. Music videos have, from the beginning, ignored cinematic conventions (like continuity editing) that are supposed to keep the story’s through-line clear; Beyoncé pushes beyond this to give us a progression that is fairly clear, and that nonetheless ignores the conventions of narrative consistency and closure. She invents a new form of expression, one that would not be possible either through film alone nor through music alone.

Beyoncé, Irreplaceable (Anthony Mandler, 2006)

This is a relatively early Beyoncé song, from her second solo album. It’s a feminist empowerment song. The video is directed by Anthony Mandler; we’ve previously seen some of his videos for Rihanna. The video pretty straightforwardly dramatizes the lyrics of the song, in which Beyoncé kicks out an unfaithful lover and (at the very end) brings in a new one. Not only are these men not irreplaceable, they are pretty much interchangeable. Noteworthy details of the video include the backlighting from the Sun that gives Beyoncé an aura; the scene in which she appears about to embrace the man who’s leaving, but instead turns out to be taking back the jacket that she had bought for him, and the performance of the song with an all-woman band.

Beyoncé, Single Ladies (Jake Nava, 2008)

This is one of Beyoncé’s most famous and popular videos. The song is another feminist empowerment anthem, telling off men who are unwilling to commit to their relationships, by putting a ring on it. The video director is Jake Nava — he has directed other videos for Beyoncé as well, and in this class we have previously seen his videos for Lana Del Rey and for Kanye West. It’s a dance video, choreographed by Frank Gatson Jr. and JaQuel Knight, both of whom have frequently worked with Beyoncé as well as other major artists. The choreography is inspired by “Mexican Breakfast”, a 1969 dance number choreographed by Bob Fosse for Gwen Verdon and two backing dancers. The music and presentation are very different, but you can see the way Beyoncé and her crew are sampling moves and gestures from Fosse. Here is an article comparing the two. Single Ladies, unlike the Fosse number, is in black-and-white. The dance also takes place in an empty space, with no backdrop and no distractions. Nava uses mostly long shots so that we can see the entire bodies of the dancers, and fairly long takes so that their movements are not broken up too much: in this, he follows the precedent set by Hollywood musicals in the 1930s through the 1950s. However, Nava also creates cinematic tension by varying the lighting throughout the video. At times, the space is entirely white; at other times, the dancers are in a spotlight, and the surrounding area is less bright. Nava also zooms in and out, at times coming much closer to Beyoncé in order to pick her out: this is something that you don’t see in classic Hollywood musicals (or in the Fosse number). Toward the end of the video, the editing becomes much more active: we have very fast cuts, and strobing light changes, to create a sense of climax. The other notable feature of the video is the titanium roboglove (complete with ring) on Beyoncé’s left arm. She may be Everywoman, but she is also a cyborg — more advanced, and more posthuman, than you and I.

Beyoncé, Why Don’t You Love Me? (Melina Matsoukas, 2010)

The song has a retro-pop feel to it. The video, conceived by Beyoncé and directed by Melina Matsoukas, is a campy 1950s parody, gleefully mixing together two sorts of of women’s roles of the decade. On the one hand, there are sitcom clichés (from I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, and other shows of the era); on the other hand, Beyoncé also performs an evocation of Bettie Page, celebrated pin-up girl of the period. (Beyoncé also sports a Bettie Page look in the video for Video Phone, which we saw earlier in the semester). The effect is hilariously incongruous; Beyoncé does housework while dressed in fancy lingerie. Among other things, she accidentally burns a roast in the oven (a definite 50s-sitcom moment), but she also fixes a car, and dusts off all her Grammy award statues. We also see her in a bubble bath, and driniking a martini and smoking a cigarette while talking on the phone to a man who evidently fails to love her back; mascara runs down her face from what we presume are her tears. The humor here matches the song, which is upbeat despite the complaints of the lyrics.

Beyoncé, Dance For You (Alan Ferguson, 2011)

This is another retro exercise; this time the video (directed by Alan Ferguson, who also directed a number of Janelle Monáe’s videos, and was married for a time to Beyoncé’s sister Solange) evokes 1940s film noir. This is not just a matter of the clothes and decor (a detective’s office in a period skyscraper), but also of the cinematography and lighting. We have changes of focus (Beyoncé first appears as a fuzzy image in the doorway, before she comes totally into focus) dramatic camera angles (think of the shot near the end where the detective is framed between Beyoncé’s stocking-clad legs), light coming in through the slats of Venetian blinds, shadows cast by rotating fans, and other such hallmarks of detective movies of the era. The man could be Humphrey Bogart (though he is nowhere as charismatic) and Beyoncé could be any number of femmes fatales. The detective mostly looks on impassively, though he smiles a bit when Beyoncé comes right up to him. The video knowingly evokes the “male gaze” that feminist film theorists have identified in classical Hollywood cinema: as Beyoncé does her sexy dance, she is extravagantly displaying herself, both to the detective and to the camera, as an object to be desired. However, this is done so knowingly and deliberately, and with such exaggeration (if that is the right word – I am not sure that it is), that Beyoncé is actively, and even aggessively, taking control of the situation, reclaiming the male fantasy as her own power and her own initiative.

Beyoncé, Partition (Jake Nava, 2013)

Another video directed by Jake Nava; another video in which Beyoncé extravagantly displays her body for the male gaze, here explicity the gaze of her husband, Jay-Z. At the beginning (after outdoor scenes of a French chateau), and again at the end of the video, we see Beyoncé from across the breakfast table, as her husband looks more at the newspaper than at her. She drops a napkin, which a maidservant dutifully comes and picks up. In between the two iterations of this opening/closing scene, we have Beyoncé in a lavish burlesque performance, featuring multiple ornate and revealing costumes, plus doubled images, top-bottom mirror images, silhouette body outlines, and dark, expressionist lighting (I especially like the dark blue). As with Dance for You, the video asks us to make our own judgment: is this (self-)exploitation? or is it Beyoncé taking control of the traditional objectification of womens’ bodies? or is it Beyoncé exalting herself beyond all measure? or is it (as at least one academic has claimed) that Beyoncé “performs the historical objectification of black female bodies and replays that objectification in order to point out that, stereotypically, black women have had few means of garnering attention beyond sexual performances”?

Beyoncé, Drunk In Love (Hype Williams, 2013)

Hype Williams directs this video in gorgeous black-and-white. It’s all on the beach, at night and early morning. Beyoncé dances, and she and Jay-Z caress one another. According to Beyoncé’s creative director Todd Tourso, the look of the video is meant to evoke the fashion photography of Herb Ritts (mostly known as a fashion photographer, but he did direct a few videos, including the beachside Madonna video Cherish, which we saw earlier in the semester). The video is pure, ecstatic lust; I am not sure what else to say about it.

Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (Andrew Donoho, Chuck Lightning, et al, 2018)

Janelle Monáe’s work, combining rock, funk, and pop idioms, has always come with a meta-narrative. (She makes what are sometimes called concept albums). Her earlier albums (one EP and two full lengths) combine to form the Metropolis Suite. (Several music videos from this suite are discussed below). The Metropolis Suite tells the story of a future society in which Monáe’s alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, is an android or robot. Androids are enslaved in this society, and Cindi Mayweather is on the run, and threatened with death, both because she is a fugitive slave, and because she is involved in a love affair with a human being, which is strictly forbidden by the society. In the course of the suite, she organizes a revolution against this oppression. As its title indicates, one major inspiration for the Metropolis Suite is Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent science fiction film Metropolis, in which (among other things) the heroine is replaced by a robot double. The Metropolis Suite, like other works of Afrofuturism, uses both science fictional projection into the future, and recollections of historical traumas (slavery, Jim Crow, and anti-miscegenation laws) in order to reflect upon, and oppose, an oppressively racist present. Monáe’s self-presentation as an android is both a commentary on the history of Black people not being recognized in white racist society as fully human, and a projection into a potential post-human future.

Monáe released the Dirty Computer “emotion picture” (as she calls it) in tandem with the album of that name. Not all the songs on the album are included in the film, but six of them get full-fledged video treatments, and parts of some others are also included on the soundtrack (Americans, the final song of the album, is heard in full during the closing credits). Once again, we have a science-fictional, Afrofuturist framing narrative. Here, Monáe is Jane 57821, in a future society where absolute conformity (especially with regard to gender and sexuality) is strictly enforced. Jane is a prisoner, whose memories are being erased, and whose free personality is being overwritten, and replaced with a blank, obedient one (in which, as a woman, she is expected to be entirely submissive). The science fictional background is lightly sketched in, and resembles many other such cinematic scenarios of dystopian future societies. The prison and brainwashing center, where the main action of the movie takes place, is characterized by severe minimalism in design: it is all straight lines and all in white. The people (guards and brainwashed prisoners) are also dressed in minimal white, with odd The dialogue is also fairly minimal. The six music videos that make up most of the movie are presented as Jane’s memories, replayed on a computer in order to be erased from her mind. The music video portions are brightly colored and active, in sharp contast to the sterile setting of the prison.

The movie as a whole is directed by Andrew Donoho (an experienced video director, who has also worked with numerous other singers and bands) and Chuck Lightning (an inside member of Monáe’s crew). But the six music videos embedded within the film are done by a number of different directors: Donoho himself (Django Jane), Alan Ferguson, who has worked with Monáe a number of times before (Make Me Feel and Crazy, Classic Life), and two younger, less established directors: Emma Westenberg (Pynk and Screwed) and Lacey Duke (I Like That). Four of these videos (Django Jane, Make Me Feel, Pynk, and I Like That) were released separately, prior to the complete album and film release. The embedded videos give us the album’s positive vision: they are precisely what the dystopian society of the framing narrative seeks to repress. Monáe presents us with a Black feminist utopia, in which women and men are free to pursue their own pleasures and their own dreams. Monáe has defined herself in interviews as queer – she has especially used the term pansexual – and Dirty Computer portrays Jane 57821 in a simultaneous relationship with another woman, Zen (Tessa Thompson) and with a man, Ché (Jayson Aaron). They are all captured and brainwashed in the facility that we see in the framing narrative; at the end of the movie, they escape. (This is not given any narrative explanation; one is not needed, precisely because Monáe’s “emotion picture” is not a traditional Hollywood narrative: it depicts a situation through a series of vignettes; this is one of the freedoms that music video gives its creators, in contrast to the demands of closure and coherence that straightforward narrative filmmaking depends upon).

All the individual video segments of Dirty Computer are sufficiently dense and beautiful as to be worthy of close, attentive analysis on their own. For reasons of length, I will only mention a few high points here. Two of the videos make feminist statements with all-women casts. Andrew Donoho’s Django Jane uses iconography from the Black Panther Party of the 1960s (quasi-military formations, deliberately adopted in order to counter traditional images of Black people as meek and submissive) as a background to Monáe’s rap proclaiming independence for Black women. In Emma Westenberg’s Pynk, which is awash in the color pink, which in the lyrics is associated with femininty in various ways, we see a utopian crew of women out in the desert; the women dance, and snap their fingers in rhythm (which also helps to emphasize the funkiness of the track). Both videos contain explicit references to female genitalia. (In one part of Pynk, we see Monáe and her backing dancers, in a row facing the camera, wearing what have been widely described as “vagina pants”; but two of the seven women are not wearing such pants, this has been interpreted as an acknoweldgement of trans women, and a rejection of biological essentialism).

Lacey Duke’s I Like That plays with multiple images of Monáe in order to convey a self-empowerment narrative. Alan Ferguson’s Make Me Feel is set in a contemporary dance club, and it uses double images of Monáe (both as the performer of the song and as one of the patrons of the club) together with vibrant lighting and careful staging (sometimes naturalistic, sometimes much more abstract) in order to portray Monáe’s simultaneous female and male love interests.

If you are interested in more detail, the Journal of the Society for American Music published a “collective reading” of Dirty Computer by a group of eight scholars, including myself. With your Wayne State ID, you can download it here. (My own contribution is a close analysis of Make Me Feel).

Janelle Monáe, videos from The Metropolis Suite: Many Moons (Alan Ferguson, 2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (Alan Ferguson, 2013)

These are both Afrofuturist videos. Many Moons introduces Monáe’s character, the android Cindi Mayweather, and Metropolis, the dystopian society in which she finds herself. The setting is a slave auction, in which the wealthy, fashionable Beautiful People of the city (both white and black) bid fabulous sums to purchase androids (all played by Monáe in multiple iterations), even as Monáe/Mayweather performs the song with her band. The song’s lyrics speak ambiguously about freedom and slavery, and Monáe dances dynamically with her pompadour and black-and-white outfit (she maintained these accoutrements throughout all her performances for The Metropolis Suite, explaining that she dressed in a black-and-white uniform in order to honor her mother and previous ancestors who could only get jobs in the service industry). Monáe’s performance is intercut with satirical shots of the Beautiful People bidding, while the androids march up and down the runway like models at a fashion show. The latter part of the song is an amazing, accelerating rap segment that simply lists multiple images, conditions, and social and political issues, as much from our own time as from the fictional future time of the video: “Civil rights, civil war, hood rat, crack whore, carefree, night club, closet drunk, bathtub, outcast, weirdo” and so on. At this point in the video, quick shots of Monáe, often closeups of her face, or just her blinking eyes, or just her mouth, are superimposed over transparent video images that give a collage of the issues she is talking about — everything from old home video shots ot children to huge crowds to marching armies to nuclear explosions. (At other times, we return to a longer shot of Monáe dancing and rapping; at these points, the images continue to appear on video screens behind her).

Q.U.E.E.N. (a title which, besides evoking queens, is also, according to Monáe, an acronym for “Queer, Untouchables, Emigrants, Excommunicated, and Negroid”) once again features a futuristic setting. The video is set in the “Living Museum,” in which “rebels that time travel” are trapped in “suspended animation.” But once the music starts, the rebels – led by Monáe and her guest star on this track, Erykah Badu, emerge from suspended animation and begin to dance. The video’s background is a sterile white – or more simply, an absence altogether. The color scheme, including Monáe’s clothing, is once again largely black-and-white, though with occasional touches of red. The musicians are mostly nude and covered with white body paint (suggesting African ritual?). Monáe’s female backup dancers wear black-and-white-horizontally-striped dresses; we sometimes see them in front of an all-white background, and other times in front of a wall of black-and-white stripes (usually vertical, but at one point horizontal). Occasionally, we see the women dancing with men dressed in black suits, with white shirts and black ties. As all these details indicate, the visual design of the video is elegant and precise. We could also say this about the editing. There is a duet between Monáe and Badu, and then the song ends (as Many Moons did) with a rap segment. At this point, the video gives us shots of Monáe in a black-and-white tuxedo (which she often wore in live performances at this point of her career) against a wall lit with spotlights in order to create a bright oval immediately behind her, and a dimmer oval surrounding it. The moment the song ends, the video immediately cuts to black.

Kanye West, Runaway (Kanye West, 2010)

Runaway pushes the boundaries of the music video, turning it into a 34-minute (including credits) short film. West conceived the story and directed the film; among his many collaborators is Hype Williams, who is credited with the screenplay. The film contains an extended version of West’s song Runaway, together with other songs from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), arguably his best album, and one that seems to be coming from a very dark place; the songs are filled with misery, fear, and self-reproach.
Runaway has a loose narrative. It concerns Kanye’s relationship with a magical woman with wings (the model Selita Ebanks). She seems like, perhaps, an angel; but she is identified in the film as a bird, and specifically as a phoenix (the mythological bird that renews its life periodically by bursting into flames and reanimating itself from the ashes). At the beginning of the film, she crashes to earth; Kanye, driving through the forest, finds her unconscious and takes her home in his arms. We see her at home; then Kanye takes her out, first to see a Carnival-like procession, then to an elaborate banquet. Towards the end, she tells him she needs to leave and go home; at the end of the film, she burns/renews herself and ascends; Kanye cannot stop her.
The story is told less through dialogue and physical action – both of which are reduced to a minimum – than through a series of tableaus, often accompanied by songs from the album. The beginning of the film shows us shots both of Kanye driving and of him running through the woods – the latter shots turn out to be flash-forwards to when Kanye futilely runs after the phoenix at the end of the film. During this opening portion, we hear a selection from Mozart (Lacrimosa, a passage about tears and lamentation from his Requiem Mass), and Nicki Minaj gives a voiceover (in a British accent, for some reason) about the perils of fame. We then see the phoenix in Kanye’s house, twitching on the couch, and watching a TV news broadcast about her crash. Kanye (shown in a separate shot) tells her never to trust the media. The phoenix seems both innocent and curious. Human things are a puzzle to her. She communes with animals connoting innocence (sheep, rabbit, deer) in Kanye’s enclosed inner courtyard; and she dances, as if discovering how to do so, as Kanye plays a song for her (Power, but without the vocals) on a sampler. The implications of all this part of the film are Edenic: the phoenix is innocent, awakening into a marvelous new world.
We next see the odd Carnivalesque procession, with a marching band, some dancers, and fireworks in the background. Kanye and the phoenix look on in wonder. The procession carries a huge carnival float of Michael Jackson. The music is Kanye’s song All of the Lights (we saw an entirely separate video for this song, directed by Hype Williams, earlier in the semester). But at the end of the procession, there are marchers in Ku Klux Klan hoods (more or less: the hoods are red, and resonate with medieval Catholic festivals, I think from Spain; but the relation to KKK hoods is unavoidable). This tableau moves us away from innocence, and towards a sense of the complexity (including racism and other evil) of the actual world. We also see the phoenix playing with a cup, as if she were figuring out for the very first time what it does, and how to use it. Despite her initial innocence, she is descending into the fallen world.
The centerpiece of the film is the elaborate banquet sequence. In an enormous hall, there is a long banquet table, with white chairs and a white tablecloth. All the guests are black people dressed in fancy white. Well back from the table stand the servers, all white people, also dressed entirely in white. Kanye enters, wearing white and purple, with the phoenix who is bedecked with jewelry etc (in the early sequences, she was close to naked). We see people gossiping at the appearance of the phoenix. Kanye’s song Devil in a New Dress plays on the soundtrack, with its talk of the opposed realities of Jesus and the Devil. One of the guests turns to Kanye and tells him, “Your girlfriend is really beautiful. Do you know she’s a bird?” Kanye awkwardly replies that he hadn’t noticed. The man continues, more or less mumbling so that he can barely be heard, “I mean, like, leave the monkey in the zoo.” The whole scene is disturbing, all the more so in that the guests mostly mask their scorn behind smiles and whispers.
This leads into the song “Runaway” itself. Kanye starts by playing the piano, then a whole crew of ballerinas, dressed in black leotards and tutus, and mostly white people (I thought I saw one Asian among them) do a ballet interpretation of the song, while Kanye stands on top of the piano and sings/raps (i.e.lip syncs). The song is extended with an instrumental coda during which we see a solo dance by one of the ballerinas. I am not sure what to make of the choreography here. But the song itself is lacerating and self-lacerating, with Kanye talking about his own inadequcies in relationships, and also offering a “toast to the douchebags… the assholes… the scumbags… the jerkoffs.” (The diners all join him in this toast).
After this lengthy musical number, we return to the awkwardness of the formal dinner. Servers put the main dishes on the table; they deposit an elaborately prepared turkey in front of Kanye and the phoenix. She starts screaming – a bird reacting to the murder of another bird – and the guests all leave. This is accompanied by Kanye’s song Hell of a Life (though, according to Wikipedia, there is also a version of the film where this song is replaced by Monster. Both songs are filled with horror).
The phoenix screams continue while we cut to a shot of the explosion/fire from the beginning (or the end?) of the film. Another Kanye song then comes up on the soundtrack — Blame Game, with a lyrical piano, and half-sung lyrics about a couple arguing and blaming one another — while the phoenix sits again in the Edenic inner garden with the peaceful animals, while (in a separate shot) Kanye stares at her from inside the house, through a floor to ceiling window. This cuts to a shot of clouds gathering, as the song dies away.
Next, we see Kanye and the phoenix, in silhouette with the clouds and the redness of (presumably) the sunset behind them, sitting on the edge of the roof of Kanye’s house. She tells him — this is the only time she speaks in the entire film — that she hates the way the world she has found herself in detests and destroys anything new; she says that statues (and presumably works of art more generally) are the remains of phoenixes that were frozen into stone, and not allowed to consume and regenerate themselves. (As she says this, the camera moves slowly around the ballerinas from the banquet scene, themselves frozen into immobility). Another song from the album begins to play: Lost in the World, which opens as a soft ballad before it builds to a more rocking climax with love lyrics. This song plays in full, for the rest of the film. As it continues playing, we get very stylized shots of the phoenix moving back and forth, lit with a reddish sunset glow, as she apparently makes love with Kanye. These shots fade in and out, and they are replaced by another shot of the explosion, only this time in slow motion. The song continues as we cut to daytime, and Kanye wakes up on the roof alone. He sees that she is missing, and runs into the forest where he met her originally. Here we have the same running scenes that we also saw at the very beginning of the movie. But he is too late; the shots of him running are intercut with shots of the fiery explosion; the phoenix has been reborn, and rises through the flames. The next time, we see her flying above the treetops, and rising ever higher into the sky. The song continues as we cut to the credits, and segues into the album’s final track, Who Will Survive in America (which is built around a sample of from Gil Scott-Heron (one of the precursors of hip hop, whose poetry-with-jazz-accompaniment, and militant lyrics, made a powerful impression in the 1970s).
What does it all mean? Kanye West takes substantial portions of his album, and re-situates them in a new narrative that is conveyed mostly by visual means. You would never be able to derive this story by just listening to the album; but the album’s sounds and words are powerfully expressive in their new context. The story doesn’t come from the songs’ lyrics, but it does come out of, and powerfully uses, all the songs’ emotions. If music videos in general are, on the deepest level, about the resonances (both emotional and cognitive) between sounds and images, then Kanye West has put together these resonances in an astonishingly powerful and original new way. His story of loving and losing the phoenix, being inspired by her, but also misunderstanding her, and suffering from how she is misunderstood by others, is a powerful (and fairly clear) allegory of the creative process (and admittedly, it still partakes of the sexist tradition, going back at least to ancient Greece, where the man is the creator, and the woman can only be his inspiration or muse); but the way the story interacts with, and is inflected by, the musical set pieces, gives it a power and depth that are unique.

Kanye West, Love Lockdown (Simon Henwood, 2008)

This is a beautifully stylized video for a song from 808 and Heartbreak, Kanye West’s most depressive album, made after a big breakup and the death of his mother. The album is so named due to its emotional themes, on the one hand, and its prominent use of synthesizers such as the Roland TR-808 drum machine, on the other. The 808 has been heavily used in dance music to create reverberating low-bass, wobbling percussive sounds that cannot be mistaken for the more flexible beats of a human drummer. As for West’s singing voice, it is spookily altered by the heavy use of Auto-Tune. This software was originally invented in order to correct errors by singers who failed to hit the proper pitch. But hip hop producers quickly discovered that you could get strange and resonant effects by messing with the settings. It could make singers and rappers sound robotic, or science-fictionally alien. Here West uses it to make his voice reverberate, so that he sounds alienated from himself: this both expresses his depression, and puts us at an odd distance from it. We both share his feeling, and yet realize that such a feeling puts him at so extreme a remove — with such a sense of loneliness — that he cannot reach us, and we cannot feel his pain enough to truly empathize with him.

The video works to accentuate this mood of alienation and distance. Kayne remains far away from us, because in his grief he is already distant from himself. The video is shot in extreme widescreen, and mostly in white. Kanye wears a white shirt and jacket, and off-white pants. His apartment is also nearly all white — both furniture and walls — in an elegantly minimalist way. This washed-out white seems to convey a sense of blankness and loss (rather than racial whiteness). First we see Kanye sitting on the couch, and then moving slowly to the window; he looks out through the white slats. Later we see him leaning back against the kitchen sink in his elegant kitchen. Still later, we see him crouching, nearly motionless, in a corner. And at the end of the video, he is back on the couch, curled up on his side, almost in fetal position. All the while, the camera observes him from a distance: from behind, or from the ceiling, and then pans away from him, and over the apartment towards the window. It pans slowly away from him, across an empty white wall. This is where the other figures in the video come in. They are dancers, warriors, and musicians, all dressed in ceremonial African garb. They were presumably shot against a green screen, but they are composited in so that they appear against the white walls. The crowd of dancers increases in size every time we return to them during the video. There are also individual dancers, shot from a closer camera, who pose or move slowly in time with the rhythm of the song. Their appearance is less bleached-out than that of Kanye’s apartment, but the color palette remains subdued – until two female dancers enter the video, entirely covered in body paint: bright blue, against which reddish abstract patterns stand out. Their vibrant brighness is startling in the context of the rest of the video. (There are also some brief shots of an object that I cannot identify, but part of which is bright red – it has been suggested that this is a spaceship, and that the whole video, with its white-on-white, is an homage to the final sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001). The video resonates strongly with the way the music is a sad ballad amplified by its rhythmic reverberations. The dancers, and especially the two women in blue seem to open the prospect of a new vitality. But the video leaves us in Kanye’s mostly empty apartment; though he is huddled in fetal position, we don’t get to see anything like a cosmic metamorphosis and rebirth (such as happens at the very end of 2001). Maybe the video, with its African references, points toward such a rebirth — but we are left still waiting for its accomplishment.

Kanye West, Monster (Jake Nava, 2011)

Monster is a song from Kanye West’s album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF), but he released a video for it that stands entirely separate from the Runaway long-form video (or short film). The director is Jake Nava, who also directed a number of videos for Beyoncé, as well as (subsequently) Shades of Cool and High on the Beach for Lana Del Rey. The video was controversial, denounced for misogyny and banned for a time from MTV and YouTube. The song is a noisy, growling banger. Besides Kanye’s own verses, there are guest raps from Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Nicki Minaj. The song takes a long-time hip hop tradition — boasting that ‘I’m the best’, and dissing the competition (other rappers) — and heightens it by systematically including horror movie references and metaphors. Hence the repeated chorus, “Everybody knows I’m a motherfucking monster.” The line evidently refers both to Kanye’s rapping prowess, and to his own self-lacerating self-investigation (a them throughout MBDTF). The video is dark and murky; it is saturated with images alluding to famous horror movies. For instance, we see zombies outside the window (as in Night of the Living Dead), mutilated, hanged, and decapitated women’s bodies (as in the early 2000s Saw franchise), as well as mad-scientist and vampire stereotypes that could have come from many sources. The tortured and murdered women, of course, are what sparked charges of misogyny against the video. And these charges obviously have considerable validity. Except that Nicki Minaj’s bravura performance, both of the song and in the video, changes everything. Monster is structured like an old-fashioned rap battle: Rick Ross, Kanye, Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj are all in a contest to see who can top whom, and who is the baddest rapper of them all. Most listeners have considered Minaj to be the victor; and this is true visually as well as sonically. Minaj appears in the video as both the vampire/torturer AND as her female victim. Minaj is known for adopting multiple personas in her raps; here, as the vampire she is “Roman Zolanski” (an aggressively unhinged, sometimes male and sometimes female alter ego, here dressed in black latex, with outrageously high heels, with fangs, and brandishing a sword), and as the victim, with the pink wig and wearing a wedding dress, she is “Harajuku Barbie” (the softly feminine alter ego; the name, of course, refers both to the well-known doll with its exaggerated feminine features, and to the fashion district of Tokyo). These personas exaggerate cliches about gender identity, and blast them into hyperspace. As Minaj’s vocal and visual performance switches back and forth between the two personas, it is hard to tell whether Roman is going to bite Barbie with vampire fangs, decapitate her, or have sex with her.

Kanye West, Fade (Eli Linnetz, 2018)

The song seems to be about the waning of a love affair (“I can feel it fade…”). It is composed around an incredibly funky bass line, together with brief vocal fragments, mostly from 1970s bands. The song is razor-sharp and filled with discontinuities, as various fragments either fade in and out with lots of reverb, or start and stop unexpectedly. The music video is dance-oriented, rather than striving to represent the lyrics in any manner. The dancer is Teyana Taylor, a singer signed to West’s record label. Her dancing, choreographed by Jae Blaze, Derek Watkins and Guapo, is extremely visceral. She dances amidst gym equipment, and a lot of her moves seem like bits and pieces from exercise routines. The movie Flashdance (1983) is an obvious reference point. But the director Eli Linnetz (interviewed here) mentions other reference points, and says in particular that he also “pulled a lot of references from ’70s and ’80s porn… That was less about the imagery and more about the texture of the skin, the oiliness.” And indeed, as we watch the video, Teyana Taylor’s skin is lovingly illuminated (something that usually only happens in the movies with white women). We also see her sweat. This accentuates the physicality of her dance performance. She is really butch, and she really commands the screen: this is in sharp contrast to the usual portrayals of sexy female backup dancers in hip hop videos, and indeed to the general ways women are objectified in Hollywood films. At the end of the video, we see the aftermath of the work-out: Taylor is nude in the shower, in some shots by herself, and in other shots sensually entwined with her real-life husband, the basketball player Iman Shumpert. Then the enigmatic final shot shows Taylor with a (prosthetic) feline (lion) face, alongside Shumpert, and with their baby (eight months old at the time), amidst a flock of sheep. This shot has been much commented but never explained; your guess is as good as mine.

Kanye West, Famous (Eli Linnetz, 2018)

I won’t say much about this video aside from noting how it is really a conceptual art piece. The song is just about three minutes long, while the video runs for almost 11 minutes. The song is notorious because of West’s line about Taylor Swift, referring to the altercation when he disrupted her award presentation at the Grammys: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous.” There’s a recording of a phone call West made to Swift, in which he supposedly got her permission to use these lines (but he didn’t tell her he was going to call her a “bitch’). The video created its own semi-scandal with its portrait of a huge bed in which West and his wife Kim Kardashian are sleeping, alongside Taylor Swift, West’s ex Amber Rose, Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Rihanna, and Chris Brown, among others. These visuals were a take-off on a 2008 painting called “The Sleepers,” by New York artist Vincent Desiderio. The most interesting thing I have read about the video is Desiderio’s own account of being summoned to meet Kanye and see the video prior to its public release, which you can read here. There is also an informative interview with Desiderio here. In short, Desiderio loved how West had sampled and remixed his art.

Here are some more music video commentaries from my class, focusing on Lady Gaga (treated rather sketchily, I’m afraid) and Lana Del Rey (about whom I think I did a somewhat better job).

Lady Gaga, Paparazzi (Jonas Åkerlund, 2009); Telephone (Jonas Åkerlund, 2010); Alejandro (Steven Klein, 2010); Born This Way (Nick Knight, 2011)

I find it hard to write about these videos, just because Lady Gaga is so familiar, and has been so frequently talked about already. Earlier in the semester we saw her new video Stupid Love (Daniel Askill, 2020), and for comparison we looked at her (now) classic Bad Romance (Francis Lawrence, 2009). The four videos listed here date from around the same time as Bad Romance; this period (2009-2011) is arguably Lady Gaga’s peak (though all her work is interesting). Paparazzi and its sequel Telephone are directed by the Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund, who has made many videos for many well-known artists, as well as concert documentaries and some low-budget action and crime thrillers. (I really like his 2002 movie Spun (a crime/comedy about meth addiction, starring Jason Schwartzman). With your Wayne State credentials, you can read an interview with Åkerlund, which has some interesting insights on his approach to directing music videos, here.

The directors of the other two videos are both primarily fashion photographers; it is not surprising that Lady Gaga, with her interest in high fashion, would recruit them to make videos. Steven Klein, in particular, has worked a lot with Madonna, who is clearly one of Lady Gaga’s biggest influences.

All four of these videos are wonderfully excessive: I mean this in terms of length, of ambition, and of their presentation of Gaga’s persona. They all showcase Lady Gaga in so extreme a way that their songs (taking up only half of the action time) almost seem incidental. It is almost as if Lady Gaga is trying to invent a whole new art form, neither music video nor movie but something in between.

Gaga’s costumes are outrageously over the top; she displays herself in ridiculous erotic tableaus; her attitudes are highly campy and yet ferocious. Paparazzi parodies the conventions of old Hollywood melodrama, with its luxurious mansion and its lurid scenario of Gaga’s boyfriend throwing her over the balcony, her return in wheelchair and crutches (which somehow only manages to make her overall look even more perverse), and her revenge by poisoning him. The sequel, Telephone, instead parodies low-budget exploitation films, with its women-in-prison scenario, Gaga’s sashying about as if she owned the place, the fake beaver shot (a scrambled flash of Gaga’s crotch), the crime spree with Beyoncé in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pussy Wagon” (from the Kill Bill movies), and — once again — the revenge poisoning of an unfaithful boyfried. (Beyoncé’s guest appearance in Gaga’s song and video coincides with Gaga’s appearance in Beyoncé’s Video Phone, which we watched earlier in the semester).

Alejandro takes the stylization even further. The video is filled with queer iconography, but it also has a quasi-military theme, with a lot of men in formation marching. It is definitely referencing Cabaret, the Broadway musical that Bob Fosse made into a film in 1972; but the black-and-white portions, and some of the costumes, also remind me of a less well-known film, Guy Maddin’s Archangel (1990), with its absurdist, hyper-melodramatic evocation of World War I (see this image, for instance). The machine guns coming out of Gaga’s breasts are memorable. We also have suggestions of s&m (as in the scenes where Gaga is humping a man chained to the bed) and — in a manner that recalls Madonna, but pushes things still further — Catholic blasphemy (the red nun’s outfit Gaga wears – not only is it pretty sexualized, but there is the scene where Gaga swallows a rosary, which was protested by some Catholic groups).

Born This Way presents us with a whole cosmic mythology as the carrier for Gaga’s pro-LGBTQ+ message. I won’t try to analyze the symbolism in this video, or its borrowings from surrealist art – there is a good rundown on all these matters here. But at the same time that it has a political message, the video also glorifies Lady Gaga herself, making her bigger than life. Arguably, the goal of most music videos is to give the artist iconic presence – Gaga can say that she has pushed this further than ever before.

Lana Del Rey, Video Games (Lana Del Rey, 2011); Born to Die (Yoanne Lemoine, 2011); National Anthem (Anthony Mandler, 2012; Summertime Sadness ((Kyne Newman & Spencer Susser, 2012); Shades of Cool (Jake Nava, 2014); High By the Beach (Jake Nava, 2015); Doin’ Time (Rich Lee, 2019)

Lana Del Rey has been exploring a consistent aesthetic for over a decade; and once again, we have an artist whose videos contribute as much to her expression as does the music in itself. Del Rey’s songs tend to be downbeat and melancholy, filled with feelings of loss and nostalgia, and idealized images of lost glamour. This can be quite complicated, for what does it mean to be nostalgic for a time that you never experienced in the first place? Del Rey, who was born in 1985, often fills her songs and videos with references to the 1950s, and to the old Hollywood that collapsed after that decade. She seems to be obsessed with images of femininity from the 1950s, which is to say from before the second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a mythical 1950s: not the same as what anybody who was alive at that time ever actually lived through, but an era as it presented itself in movies and rock music. This mythical 1950s was a time when women were placed on a pedestal but had very little real power, and were pretty much expected to be passive, to have no career ambitions, to be objectified as sex objects. It is unclear how to interpret this; it is somehow wrong either to say that it is “sincere” or to say that it is “ironic.” Del Rey seems to be valuing a status of unfulfilled desire; she wants to be glamorous and beautiful, and she wants to be loved by the sort of male icon (bad boys on motorcycles in 1950s movies) who are desirable precisely because they are unattainable, seemingly so self-contained that they never manifest vulnerability or need.

Lana Del Rey’s earlier videos were self-directed, and self-posted on YouTube before she had a record contract. Video Games was the first one to get widespread notice. It combines shots of Del Rey singing the song with lots of old footage (or footage which is made grainy to appear old – for instance, there is lots of skateboarding footage, but skateboarding didn’t really become popular until the 1970s; of course, video games themselves didn’t exist in the 1950s). We see movie stars, Los Angeles streets, stars on the Hollywood Boulevard pavement, the Hollywood sign itself, and so on. The song expresses romantic longing, while the video feels like a collage of broken-down fragments. Del Rey seems to be yearning for a past that never actually existed, but that is a construction of popular culture.

Born to Die is much higher-budget, and was the first video Del Rey made with record company support and a professional director. We see shots of Del Rey and her bare-chested, heavily tattooed boyfriend (played by the model Bradley Soileau) – another image of male strength and inaccessibility. We see them cuddling in front of an enormous American flag at the start and end of the video. In between, we see them making out in a car, lying on a bed, and finally with a dead and bloodied Del Rey being held in the boyfriend’s arms, at night, while fires rage in the background. No particular time is suggested, but the vintage automobile suggests (once again) the 1950s. These scenes are intercut with shots of Del Rey lip syncing as she sits on a throne, in a white gown, with a crown-like headdress, in an ornate, old European chapel, with tigers to either side of her. Romantic longing is linked to stasis and death.

National Anthem is eight minutes long, so (like some of the Lady Gaga videos we discussed before), it goes beyond being just the presentation of a single song, but is considerably more ambitious). Del Rey had the original concept for the video, and wrote the treatment. The final video is directed by Anthony Mandler, who has also directed videos for Rihanna and other major stars. Everything in the video is keyed to the Presidency of John F Kennedy (elected 1960, assassinated 1963). Del Rey first appears as the actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, re-enacting a famous performance from 1962, in which Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK (Monroe and Kennedy were rumored to have had an affair). This sequence is shot in black and white, reminiscent of TV footage from the time. The rest of the video is shot in color, but with a graininess, simulated scratches, and aspect ratio that are all reminiscent of old low-quality, 8mm film. Here Del Rey appears in the role of JFK’s wife Jacqueline Kennedy (later Onassis). She was famous for bringing glamour to the White House. We see her in various domestic and official sequences; the end of the video mimics the famous Zapruder film (the only existing photographic record of JKF’s actual assassination – we see Kennedy’s head explode from the bullet, and Jackie both reaching to cradle his head and then climbing in panic over the back of the car). So in this respect, through her identification with both Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, the video is another one of Del Rey’s evocations of lost, tragic glamour. Whatever the truth behind the Kennedy assassination, the event quickly became mythologized as the moment that the United States lost its innocence, or the facade of normalcy that dominated the 1950s, and descended into chaos and violence. What complicates all this, of course, is that the role of the smooth, sexy, charming, and charismatic JFK is played by the rapper ASAP Rocky. The video dates from the Obama administration, but it imagines a Black Presidency fifty years before. The myth of the JFK administration as a happier time is pushed even further with the counterfactual dream that racism was already overcome in that period (in fact, Kennedy’s presidency coincided with the struggles of the early Civil Rights movement; the Civil Rights Act, banning racial segregation, was not passed until after his death in 1964, and the Supreme Court did not rule against anti-miscegenation laws until 1967). All this suggests that the magical past Del Rey yearns for in the song not only is long gone, but didn’t really exist in the first place. While the lyrics of the song bitterly tell us that “money is the anthem of success” and in fact rules everything, the video turns to national mythology in its effort to imagine a better time, while also acknowledging that this better time has never really existed.

Summertime Sadness is another downbeat, melancholy song. We see shots of Del Rey and another woman (played by Jamie King, whose husband Kyle Newman co-directed the video) who seem to be a couple. There are repeated quick shots of both of them smiling at times, together and apart; but they both look sad for most of the video. The time sequence of the video is entirely non-linear, but at different points both women seem to commit suicide, throwing themselves, separately, into the abyss. There is one shot of a Jesus-crucifixion statue, and afterwards we see Del Rey jumping with her arms outstretched in the same pose. We also see repeated shots of Del Rey floating downwards in slow motion after jumping, but we do not see any bodies hitting the ground -instead, some sort of manufactured object falls and shatters on the floor at about 3:48. The video goes even further than Del Rey’s earlier ones in making the image unclear: it is often blurry, softly focused or out of focus, discolored, disrupted by lens flare, scratched as if age-damaged, and so on. We also see repeated images of clouds and fog. Most videos seem to unfold in a heightened present moment – even if the song invokes memories, and the visuals involve flashbacks, the present-time intensity of what whe hear and see makes us feel like the song/video is NOW. But Summertime Sadness — quite unusually — really feels like it is happening in the past tense: the visual blur and instability, the nonlinear timeline, and the depressive, minor-key feel of the song, all come together to create this impression.

In Shades of Cool, Del Rey’s desire is focused upon an unattainable male figure. She loves him for his “cool”, but this attitude is what makes him emotionally unavailable. In the song’s lyrics, Del Rey both boasts that “when he calls, he calls for me and not for you,” and confesses that “I can’t break through your world,” can’t finally reach him. In the video, this male object of desire (played by Mark Mahoney, a famed tattoo artist) is much older than Del Rey, and seems to look past her with his blank stare, even when they are together. Where he stands out clearly for most of the video, Del Rey is usually shot in superimposition with other images, often dark and blurry ones. There are also the swimming pool scenes: here we see Del Rey’s image clearly, but he doesn’t seem even to see her when she swims past behind the glass; he is encased in a blue glow — and there are some shots with him in front of the glass window showing an underwater part of the swimming pool, but she doesn’t appear at all. (There is an alternate “director’s cut” of the video in which Del Rey drowns at the bottom of the swimming pool, but it has been suppressed – there’s an article about it here, but the link to the video itself no longer works. As with so many of Del Rey’s songs and videos, Shades of Cool seems to depict a desire that is incapable of being satisfied. I wrote about this video at greater length in my book.

High By the Beach stands out for its unexpected juxtapositions. The lyrics dramatize a kiss-off to an ex: she’s tired of his demands and his bullshit, and “all I wanna do is get high by the beach.” But the video turns the song into Del Rey’s equivalent of Lady Gaga’s complaint about intrusive paparazzi. Del Rey wanders idly through a modernist vacation house below a freeway and right by the water; but her dreamy solitude is disrupted by a hovering helicoptor, with a photographer within. She runs — followed by a handheld camera — along a passageway, down the stairs, and out to the rocks by the water, from where she retrieves a guitar case; she runs back upstairs, opens up the case, retrieves a large anti-aircraft gun (??? I know nothing about firearms, but people have told me that this is an entirely fictional weapon, rather than an identifiable model) and shoots the helicopter, which bursts into flames. This is a fantasy wish fulfillment, in contrast to the unachievable desires of so many of the other songs and videos. At 4:30, close to the end of the video, after all the debris from the helicopter have scattered, we see a piece of paper on the rocks which contains, handwritten, the final lines of the song (which Del Rey raps rather than sings, almost indiscernibly because her voice is drowned by the instrumentation): “Anyone can start again/ Not through love, but through revenge/ Through the fire, we’re born again/ Peace by vengeance, brings the end.” But the waves come in, and when they retreat again, the paper has been washed away.

Doin’ Time is Lana Del Rey’s cover of a 1996 song by the band Sublime. This song itself incorporates the melody and lyrics of George Gershwin’s old standard Summertime (1934). The video portrays Del Rey as a gigantic woman, walking across Los Angeles to the beach (presumably referencing the 1958 low-budget science fiction film Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman). But this itself turns out to be a movie playing at a drive-in in the 1950s. Del Rey appears here too; when her boyfriend starts making out with another girl, the gigantic Del Rey steps out of the movie frame and into the drive-in to wreak revenge. The playful self-referentiality of this video allows Del Rey to embody a more upbeat song, while still registering her most common themes (1950s stylings, jealousy and unfulfillment, etc.).