Fortunately, not everyone’s dad is violently murdered when they are five years old, followed by a barrage of media coverage and distraught fans.
I think you were looking for comparisons. Sean can’t win with some people. Don’t you think he’s painfully aware that people are going to be looking at the video the way you did?
When I hear things like this it reminds me of exactly how much The Beatles ripped off The Pretty Things… and this is like the hipster knock-off version of that. The video reminded me of Dragnet’s satanic mass scene.
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Yes, quite. Doesn’t seem like Sean is much worse for wear.
When he collaborated with Max Cavalera & Soulfly, I certainly wasn’t thinking about his dad… I know what you mean about the inevitability of comparison, but I think that when you make music and video so directly referring to your parent’s period, the problem there doesn’t lie with the audience. In this instance, it’s more like the comparison that Brian Herbert will inevitably get since he chose to revisit and vandalise Dune.
Anyway, good for Sean that he didn’t give up on music entirely - He’s a very talented musician and has produced much better music than this. I seem to recall that the constant comparisons drove Julian from the music business for a long time.
It’s a Maybelline model and the heir to the Lennon estate/glasses/nose. At the end, Vimeo said:
MORE INDIE ROCK VIDEOS THIS WAY >>>
NB. I don’t begrudge them their inheritances (genetic or financial). It just seemed funny.
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I’m completely with you ctphillips… We constantly see this kind of nostalgia for a time we couldn’t experience, and I guess psychedelic cult is the next in the cycle… We already had the Polyphonic Spree and Magnetic Zeros, but at least those seemed more earnest… This just seems like dress-up time, literally from dad’s closet.
I also second your call-out on the nudity comparison to Thicke. To me, putting it in the context of a cult is even more questionable and this video doesn’t seem to be subverting the concept at all. Seriously, naked models disarm angry cops with their sex and drugs?
Okay, here is what is wrong with Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. The actual topic of the song is objectifying women. It’s a song about how he can’t reconcile his impression of a woman as a “good girl” trope with the fact that she is interested in sex. It is a song specifically about the fact that he regards women as shallow stereotypes and feels confused when they switch from one to another.
The video matches the song perfectly, half naked women appear to be having fun enticing fully dressed men who don’t seem 100% sure what to do with themselves.
It’s the message.
I can even kind of enjoy it as a way of poking fun at people who could be so genuinely confused by the fact that women are humans but it creeps me out because Thicke really doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. So to be clear, I thought the nudity in Thicke’s video completely made sense* - it’s just that the sense that it made was to make the point, “Wow, women… what’s up with that?”
I realize this isn’t what you’ll hear from a lot of people, a lot of people who didn’t like Blurred Lines probably didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the song or the video or reading interviews with Robin Thicke about the song. But just because people don’t articulate all of that, it doesn’t mean that what was bothering them was the nudity itself, and it doesn’t mean that there is any comparison between this video and that one just because there are some naked women in it. There are people wearing rabbit masks in the video but I’m not going to start making comparisons to Donnie Darko.
With regard to this video, and why there were naked women in it, and whether it was subverting the idea of a cult at all, I really have only two things to say: 1) the cops were not swayed by sex, they were swayed by mystical third eyes opening on their foreheads, and 2) aliens. So I think this might be a case where reasonable people can disagree about the interpretation of art.
*Not that the presence of nudity is a special thing that needs to be made sense of compared to any other element
Not untrue, but man…that 35mm is so rich, especially given all the close-but-still-flat digital we have to look at these days.
I agree with your take on Thicke- no need to spill more ink on that topic. I think that it is apt to compare the two however, because they are both objectifying ladies. They exist in this video as objects for the viewer, without any hint of subversion. There are too many unsavory cases where “free love” was just a pretense for sexual coercion in these kinds of cults- to just use it as scene dressing in a music video is simply crass. Presence of nudity is special, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous; that’s why we aren’t talking about bunny masks.
I think we probably all agree that cults are full of sexual coercion. I guess because of that it makes sense to me that a video about a cult would feature elements of implied sexual coercion. Anyway, it’s an easy thing to disapprove of if you didn’t like the song/video and approve of if you did like the song/video, so I feel like this is essentially an aesthetic argument.
I don’t know if I was being disingenuous or not with the whole nudity thing. I understand that in North American culture especially nudity has a bubble around it. If I want to put a pointless horse in my music video people may be perplexed but they won’t ask me to justify myself. But if I put pointless nudity in my music video then I will be asked what justified it. I am aware of that fact, so acting as if I am not would be disingenuous. At the same time I don’t see a reason to accept or stand up for that way of thinking, so I am completely ingenuous.
Well said Humbabella- its easy for our personal tastes to color our
feelings about such topics… I had an overall negative reaction to the
video, thus its easy for me to argue that everything about it is bad. I
think my main objection to the piece is actually says more about my own
personal problem with Sean Lennon and his 26 year old model
girlfriend/bandmate. That problem is called jealousy 
I know what you mean about the nudity receiving special treatment in the
US. I also tend to personally believe nakedness is “no big deal”- I spent
years in art school painting from the nude model and became pretty well
desensitized to it… Naked people are great! But art school also taught me
what real nakedness looks like and how it is transformed by the art form
that reproduces it. Nudity is always political, and when it is in popular
media, or used to sell something there’s no way around talking about it.
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