Monday, May 26, 2014

You wouldn't recognize the best song ever if it punched you in your stupid face!


And I hope it does!

About two years ago I had a spell of listening to pop music, and I really came away hating One Direction. I also came away realizing that they are important to many people I care about, and that can be okay, so I usually don't say anything.

I still hate them so much. I know it goes past logic. Just being in the mall once I caught the beginning of "Kiss You" and was filled with rage at them pretending they were even capable of riding motorcycles; I did not feel this way about the Go-Go's pretending to water ski in "Vacation".

In July 2013 my Twitter timeline was full of exclamations and gushing about One Direction's new release, "Best Song Ever". Not only were teens gushing in their own tweets, they were re-tweeting the praise of other fans I did not follow, so the volume of the comments was quite high. That was its own level of annoyance, but nothing compared to actually watching it.

I kept silent then, but now I am writing about music videos -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- so this is my time. There could be some hurt feelings, but they don't usually read my blog posts unless I point them to a specific one, so I am going for it.

Here is the link if you wish to see for yourself:


And it's okay if you don't want to watch it. It sucks, and I am going to describe it for you.

The video opens with an establishing shot of the Hollywood sign and goes into the office of two executives blathering, and praising the band as they come in. This is "funny", because the two executives are played by two of the members of One Direction. The other three play the sexy assistant, the publicist, and the choreographer.

They talk about the movie and how big it is going to be, again praising the band a lot, but the boys object to the costume concepts that other boy bands have worn, and the choreography. "Never in a million years." They then proceed to, while perhaps not being dressed identically still wearing hair and clothing typical of a boy band, dance around wrecking the place. They point their fingers all tough at the executives, throw papers into the air and turn over desks of other employees, and then they spray paint "THIS IS US" over the bottom of a poster of them.

The video has several things wrong with it, but I think what really killed me was the excessive praise. It was Twilight all over again.

One bothersome thing was how derivative it was. The one executive seemed to look an awful lot like Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder. Hey, you know who else has done fat executives who act cooler than they actually are? David Lee Roth.

Actually, playing multiple roles in music videos is not that unusual. We could talk about Fall Out Boy playing regular and nerd versions of themselves in "Dance Dance", but we will be spending about two weeks on Fall Out Boy videos later.


"Holiday" by Green Day is sometimes mentioned. There are some funny costume changes. The actual role-playing feels less prominent, but I mention it anyway because it has much better green screen antics than "Kiss You", which in addition to ripping off "Vacation" also rips off Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock".


So let's just call the best music video for musicians playing multiple roles "Learn to Fly" from the Foo Fighters. They don't just take on other selves; they take on every featured face in the video other than a cameo from Jack Black and Kyle Gassner. This includes surprisingly nuanced performances by Dave Grohl including, among others, a star struck young girl and a flamboyant steward. Plus, the band saves the day due to their preference for alcohol over coffee, which seems pretty plausible.


Even the intro, once the music started, was heavily derivative of the Who's "Baba O'Riley", which, incidentally, was the last interesting thing about the song. Normally I hate this type of music because of the focus on beautiful girls who don't know that they're beautiful and are therefore ripe for use and abuse.

This song spends less time on the twisted view of women and instead disrespects music. While I will acknowledge that you might like a song more after it becomes associated with a memory, like dancing with someone you are attracted to, when that does happen it should not be possible that you will then forget how the song goes. Yes, the song they describe is quite vapid, which makes forgetting it more likely, there should just be a higher regard for music, and higher expectations, than evinced in this song.

With all of that, I still believe the worst part is the pretense of rebellion. They say "Never in a million years" to the described dance routine, but in fact it takes less than two minutes for choreographed dancing to occur. Maybe they were specifically saying "no" to the pirouettes, but what does that say? We will do dance numbers, but they shouldn't take any talent or skill. I don't normally like playing up gender bias, but if that's what they're hinting at, then I think it's fair game to say that what they are doing is not terribly masculine.

Yes, they might act a little shirty with executives, but they also make the movie and release the records and completely toe the company line. In fact, when they start getting really "destructive", it is out disrupting the rank and file's workplaces. How typically corporate.

I believe they are trying to summon the image of bad boy rock stars trashing their hotel rooms, but even if that behavior were admirable, merely pretending to emulate it while still being overproduced pawns is the opposite of rock and roll.

Graffiti has a long history with a lot of meaning. We could talk about trying to establish some ownership and some permanence, and how hard authority has fought that, and we could talk about the value of artistic expression. There were girls saying that the "This is us" was One Direction's way of saying that they would not change with success and they were still them. No! It's the name of the movie!  If they wanted to have some meaning they could have painted over their faces - they just turned a regular poster into a movie poster. What an artistic triumph.

Going back to my title and opening, I won't try and define a best song ever, because I think it's more productive to just enjoy the wealth of good songs out there. A lot of those good songs can have an impact where it is like getting punched in the face. Music can release your feelings and change your mind.

I don't understand how anyone can get so excited over this tripe, as shallow, uncreative, and blatantly commercial as it is. I guess it is triumphantly mediocre, and there can be worse things. The next two posts will go from being merely banal to being evil.

For now, it's just, hey, One Direction, irritating me ever since I found out that were a Saturday Night Live guest instead of a skit, like 2Gether. They could have been okay as a skit.

No comments:

Post a Comment