Music Video Monday: Florence + The Machine

music video meme sound of music

If I post a music video every Monday, or every other Monday, or on random Mondays when I feel like it, I will officially be playing more music than this channel on your cable box called MTV.

That channel, which was once proud and powerful, is now apparently dedicated to documentaries about the fake-tanning habits of young, unmarried losers in New Jersey with gelled hair and steroid problems and fake body parts.

 

Watch this insane video by Florence + The Machine, then use your literary powers of deconstruction to figure out what it’s trying to say.

I believe the alien go-go dancers are a tribute to all the green alien women Captain Kirk conquered back in the 1960s, and that the end of the video pays homage to the only good scene in X-MEN: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN OR WHATEVER when Famke Janssen, who rocked as an evil Bond girl in Goldeneye, went nuts and turned all these bad guys into dust because Hugh Jackman refused to go steady with her.

TAKE ON ME by A-Ha

If you were alive, and breathing, you remember watching this on what we used to call MTV, which played these things called “music videos” instead of endless reality shows starring people from New Jersey who tan a lot.

Sidenote: Sir Tans a Lot would be a funny name for a rapper who made fun of The Situation.

Three things: (1) the hair makes me laugh, (2) the effects seems cheap now and (3) the storytelling in the video is much better than the lyrics of the song.

Check out the lyrics below.  I’ve read them twice. Saw the video a zillion times. The video sort of makes sense. The lyrics, not so much.

TAKE ON ME

by A-Ha

We’re talking away
I don’t know what
I’m to say I’ll say it anyway
Today’s another day to find you
Shying away
I’ll be coming for your love, OK?
Take on me, take me on
I’ll be gone
In a day or two

So needless to say
I’m odds and ends
But that’s me stumbling away
Slowly learning that life is OK.
Say after me
It’s no better to be safe than sorry

Take on me, take me on
I’ll be gone
In a day or two

Oh the things that you say
Is it life or
Just a play my worries away
You’re all the things I’ve got to
remember
You’re shying away
I’ll be coming for you anyway

Take on me, take me on
I’ll be gone
In a day or two

 

The evil truth about reality stars like Snooki and The Situation

I marvel at how people like Snooki and The Situation and the Kardashian sisters are famous, or infamous, though they wouldn’t know the difference if you flew in a Harvard linguist professor to explain it to them every morning.

Snooki has a book deal. The Kardashian sisters have clothing lines and money coming out of their ears.

The joker who calls himself The Situation in on track to earn $5 million this year.

I have witnessed episodes from the first season of Jersey Shore by using the power of the internets, and I have come to an epiphany.

These people are not making scads of money, scoring book deals and dancing badly on “Dancing With A Few Stars and A Bunch of Other Schmucks” in spite of their obvious handicaps in the areas of brains and common sense.

Just up the road from the beaches of New Jersey are thousands of people on Broadway who can sing, dance and act. Many of them are gorgeous. In every way, they are clearly superior to the reality stars picked by producers to invade our lives. So why aren’t they making $5 million a year and getting on the covers of all the tabloids?

Let it be known: These reality stars are not chosen and elevated in spite of their lack of common sense. They are famous precisely BECAUSE OF this very flaw.

Normal, well-adjusted people are boring. They don’t make for exciting television.

If a film crew followed you or me around for 24 hours, they wouldn’t get footage of four random hookups, two screaming matches and a bar fight. They’d get film of us driving to work, doing our jobs and fighting traffic on the way home to have dinner. If you’ve got pookies, maybe you take them to soccer or baseball or whatever. If you’re young and single, maybe you catch Arcade Fire if they’re in town.

You would not spend three hours showering, spray tanning and doing your hair to get ready to go clubbing, then get into a bar fight.

You would not steal your roommates latest girlfriend, as they have been a steady item for at least 48 hours, which is a record. You would not drink all of the booze in the house and call your father at 3 a.m. while you were crying and whining about your boyfriend being pissed about that fact that you slept with a roommate or three.

You would not not order pizza and tell the pizza man that your last name is Situation and your first name is The.

And therefore you do not have, and will never have, a reality show.