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9.23.14: The Last VJ’s Top 5 Music Videos of the Week

Welcome to The Last VJ, music fans! This week I pulled out all the stops collecting the best of the best. We’ve got a music video from one of the most brilliant French film directors working today, a twisted take on the Goldilocks story, and some fine old grindhouse spaceman loving for you. Only the best of the best make this list each week, so enjoy.

Oh, and to all the GamerGate haters out therein the world making your rape threats and doxxing female designers? That last video is for you.

Crunk Witch, “Moonbase Blues”

Crunk Witch is a band I’ve been a fan of for a pretty long time, but this is the first music video I can ever remember from them. It’s a doozy, though, and brilliant piece of trash pop.

From director Jason Bosch we get a tale of a spaceman that crash lands on a distant planet and falls in love with a pink-haired humanoid alien. The two bond and make love, but eventually the man decides to head back out to the stars. Jilted and hurt, the alien kills him with his own laser pistol.

It’s not an original plot, and Bosch knows that. That’s why he’s presented the whole thing in a picture perfect old drive-in style of film. Scratches on the celluloid, a missing reel, incomprehensible subtitles over other incomprehensible subtitles, weird psychedelic effects used to not show a sex scene, it’s all there. Even Robert Rodriguez didn’t put this kind of dedication into crafting a true throwback from the days of grindhouse. Well done indeed.

MC Frontalot feat. Jean Grae, “Gold Locks”

Well, here’s something completely new and insane. We all the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story, of course. If you read Fables you might even be familiar with a slightly more edgy retelling of that story. No one has ever taken it and turned Goldilocks into a skullfaced murder and eater of bears on a camping trip though.

Until now! MC Frontalot has teamed with BroSis (Max Isaacson and Morgan Faust) to create something devilish, macabre, surreal, and completely brilliant. It’s the little touches that sell it, like the bear cubs clutching a tiny little human scout master in fear rather than a teddy bear. Oh, and the dancing girl bears behind the tent sheet. Stuff like this only comes from pure genius or sniffing glue.

Ariel Pink, “Put Your Number in My Phone”

A great music video makes you tell a story in your head because you’re seeing the cinemaudio climax of a whole unseen narrative. This is just the money shot of the story, or it should be. In “Put Your Number in My Phone” that is definitely the case.

We follow a young man taking his disabled older relative for a walk around the mall. Both are dressed in rather extreme fashion, and it’s clear that the wheelchair bound man has only the most limited of functions. He can play a little air hockey and use his smartphone, but that is more or less it.

His younger relative spends a fair amount of time trying to interest women in the mall romantically, but most seem turned off by his attachment to the disabled man. They don’t want to deal with it, and I realized while watching it that is was like listening to some guy claim he couldn’t be interested in a single mother. It’s a weird but excellent juxtaposition that echoes nicely with the sentiment of the song. All it’s asking for is maybe a phone call in between moments of greater responsibility, as it’s clear the young man cares very much for his charge. Director Grant Singer turns a trip to the mall into something sad, but beautiful and even at times hilarious.

The Raveonettes “Killer in the Street”

So I was all like, “There’s a new Raveonettes” video on YouTube. I’d better check it ou… Holy Shit it was directed by Rie Ramussen!” By the way, if you haven’t ever seen the French film Angel-A then you should fix that post-haste because it’s seven flavors of perfect.

Back to the video. It’s a surreal noir setting that challenges and destroys. We see scene after scene of gruesome gun murder committed by people that have only to point their fingers and shoot. It’s a weird take on the crime drama genre, but it’s a compelling look at the idea that it’s the person that pulls the trigger, not the weapon. To me it says, “We’re all armed and deadly, and given the right rage or desperation we’ll all shoot.” Bloody good work.

Jonathan Mann, “Are Video Games Sexist?”

And now… this. I’m a dedicated follower of the recent brouhaha regarding video games, feminism, Anita Sarkeesian, and Gamergate, and I am firmly on the side of the fence that feels saying you want to drink the blood out of a woman’s cunt because she spoke derogatively about the amount of sexist tropes in AAA titles is proof there’s a major freakin’ problem.

Enter Dr. Christina Sommers, a feminist the way Lex Luthor is just a guy interested in keeping metahumans in check. She’s usually trotted out by the ham-brained sect of folks as proof not all women feel the prevalence of sexist tropes in modern media is worth mentioning and is in fact turning men and boys in rampaging gaylords. I wanted to type out my own response to her latest YouTube video on the gaming industry, but every time I do my home row starts spewing menstrual blood.

Thankfully, Jonathan Mann has done it better than I ever could have by autotuning Sommers’ words and rebutting them with some sick acoustipop. Not only does he destroy her empty arguments, he does it in rhyme with a voice like honey. In my opinion this is not only a great method of dialogue on pertinent issues of the day, it should be the ONLY method. May Rassilon bless you and The Other preserve you, my son, for you do the work of the just.

Jef has a new story, a tale of headless strippers and The Rolling Stones, available now in Broken Mirrors, Fractured Minds. You can also connect with him on Facebook.

by Jef With One F