Way back at the beginning of this blog, writing about the Bangles’ “Going Down to Liverpool,” I mentioned how a poll I had conducted on a message board was what initially got this whole project underway. Looking up my own list of videos for that poll, I see that these two were high: I had Todd Terje at #4, Wilco at #6. My #1 is still to come. All told, I’ll end up writing about nine of my Top 10, 43 of my Top 50. The seven that got lost along the way:
“Time After Time,” Cyndi Lauper (1984): Truly one of the greatest videos ever made. I wrote about it in detail already, though, in You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen, my book about pop music in films and on TV (in conjunction with the song’s use in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Napoleon Dynamite, and Stranger Things).
“Man on the Moon,” R.E.M. (1992): Replaced here by R.E.M.’s two videos for “We All Go Back to Where We Belong.”
“Avant Gardener,” Courtney Barnett (2013)
“You’re One,” Imperial Teen (1996)
“Telephone,” Lady Gaga & Beyoncé (2010)
“Disorder,” Joy Division (1979)
“Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” Melanie (1970)
I’ll skip explanations as to why the last five were cut–it wasn’t that I had a change of heart about any of them–but the point is, the book that will come out of the blog was right there in that initial list. And these two sat, and sit, near the very top.
“I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” led off Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the group’s fourth album, with a backstory that makes it a benchmark in the history of music on the internet (a backstory that also , in a way, ties in with the video I’m writing about here). In brief: Reprise Records, Wilco’s label, wasn’t satisfied when they were presented with the finished album in 2001, so Wilco left the label and made it available for free online. (Streamable only, according to Wikipedia, not for download–I don’t know what software was out there in 2001, but I’ve used programs before that allow you to download from, say, Soundcloud.) Nonesuch Records officially released the LP a few months later, and it went on to top Pazz & Jop’s 2002 album list (partly–maybe even mostly, skeptics would say–driven by the story’s David and Goliath vibe). Not sure how much of that story I knew at the time–I was voting in Pazz & Jop, but just singles, with only minimal interest in the album side of things.* Anyway, only in the internet age could such a thing happen; to quote Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, a story that amounts to “You don’t want to pay me? Fuck you.”
The video, too, is a product of the internet’s democratization of creating and acquiring art (I’m mostly kidding by using such a lofty word as “democratization”; for people who make art, I’m pretty sure they’d prefer something a lot harsher)–another case of someone out there deciding they could come up with a video of their own that would surpass anything the band itself could conjure up. Toren Hardee, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”’s creator, is much more up-front about it than most DIY uploaders found on YouTube: “unofficial music video?” is parenthetically attached to the title,** and in the accompanying description Hardee says “I done gone and made this fer my film class.” If anyone in Wilco objected, they’ve been a little slow in taking legal action: the video has been on YouTube for 16 years and counting (94,000 views), and if there was ever an official clip for the song, there’s no evidence of it now. I realize now that I could have grouped “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” with Vic Mensa’s “Down on My Luck”; both videos play around with time–fragmenting, reversing, and looping it, folding it back in on itself–in a manner that gets inside the headspace of what Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy so memorably dubbed the “American aquarium drinker” in “I Am Trying”’s opening line (describing himself, of course). Wilco’s video is not set in a club, and it’s about a relationship, not the misadventures of one guy stumbling around with a drink in his hand. But there is drinking, and you can’t have one without the other: sooner or later There Will Be Stumbling, and sure enough there is.
Everything opens on the sunshiny expanse of a campus commons; in speeded-up motion, people zip in and out of dorms, congregate on benches, head out for their next class. Cut to time-lapse photography of some overhead clouds, a technique that turns up frequently in some of my favourite films and TV shows (Zodiac, 20th Century Women, Breaking Bad–it’s all over the latter). I wouldn’t say it’s the most creative way to elide time, but it almost always looks good (sometimes stunningly so), and I’m very susceptible to its appeal. We’re returned to the campus, a different dorm now, nighttime, with a few guys barbecuing out front in the left foreground of the frame, and the orangey glow of the building’s entrance visible in the center background. Indicative of this video’s aspirations, credits have been rolling by: title, two actors, the director, and, to finish, “music by wilco,” all lower-case, because people like Toren Hardee and me (see this book’s cover) think all lower-case looks poetic.
Just before the 30-second mark we move indoors to find one of Tweedy’s American aquarium drinkers lifting a paper cup to his mouth in slow-motion. Two or three people surround him, urging him on: living la campus loca. He exits the building–stumbling out of that orangey glow we glimpsed earlier, another assassin hiding down the avenue–and glances up at one of the dorm windows, where a young woman stands immobile inside, either looking down at the floor, back out the window, or at the Frank Zappa poster on her wall (Cal St. College, Nov. 8, 1972, backed by Alice Cooper; tickets look to be $3.50)–her head is tilted in such a way that you can’t be sure. The aquarium drinker has managed to find his way to his own room and promptly collapses on his bed. Everything is fairly straightforward so far: he’s drunk, she’s been waiting for him, all is not well. He is trying to break her heart.
And, as we proceed to find out in a series of scrambled-up vignettes, he’s doing a very good job of it. Reverse-motion lifts him out of bed, walks him backwards through the orange glow, and drops him into his girlfriend’s room. He can barely stand up–visibly distraught, she pushes him out into the hallway. Does all of this transpire later that same night, or have we flashed back to a day or six months or a year before? Because of the reverse-motion, there’s no way to be sure. We get a second and third take of the same scene: more shoving, more hallways navigated, trying to get it right and making everything worse. The backwards-rolling clouds return (rolling towards us earlier, now away), and we’re transported to happier times from the past–swinging on a suspended tire, a rooftop conversation, walking hand-in-hand, sharing sugary-looking treats in a food court–until we end up at what is essentially the origin moment of this relationship, the night they were introduced. It’s a dorm party exactly like the one the guy stumbled out of earlier (by which I mean later); the two of them stand back-to-back, a mutual friend gently nudges them so that they face each other, and they awkwardly shake hands. A group photo is snapped–16 years ago, so an actual photo, not a selfie–the image is frozen, and we’re back in the here and now, as he stares at the photo on his laptop (much like The Social Network’s final image of Mark Zuckerberg staring at his computer screen–the Wilco video was made two years earlier). There’s a knock at the door, and yes, it’s her. They embrace, but what we hear doesn’t jibe with what we see: “What was I thinking when I let you back in?” Tweedy sings.
I get bogged down in second-by-second descriptions sometimes, I know. I won’t even attempt that for the last minute of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” though, as the fragmentation and time-shifting picks up speed and defies any kind of narrative closure. The anchoring shot–intercut with a procession of quick flashbacks–is the two of them standing face to face at yet another dorm party (when? I’m not sure–going by their clothes, the night of their reconciliation). People around them flit back and forth in stop motion; they’re hand-in-hand, he drifts away (in search of the next aquarium, maybe), she casts her eyes down. Final shot: those rolling clouds, but just drifting now, slowed down to relative tranquility.
As good a match as “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” makes with the Vic Mensa video, “Down on My Luck” is, after all, the drunken fever-dream of one man; Wilco’s version is more like a condensed, college-rock Annie Hall.*** In Allen’s film (which I think is the one film of his you can still claim to love without a lot of mitigating disclaimers), you get all the various stages of a relationship, from the sweet, la-di-da introduction of Annie and Alvy after tennis to their dead-shark, something-inside-just-died dissolution in Hollywood. No alcohol involved, but the contours are the same, and both Allen and Hardee cut their storyboards up and scatter the pieces all over the floor. It’s no surprise that, with Hardee having been a film student,**** his video wears its influences openly and proudly; that’s what film students do, every chance they get, pay homage to their heroes. (I speak from first-hand experience.) Alain Resnais (fractured timeline), Chris Marker (some of the stop-motion near the end reminds me of La Jetée), Godfrey Reggio (do those rolling clouds evoke Koyaanisqatsi? I don’t know, I’ve never seen it), etc.–they’re all over Hardee’s video, and if I’m completely wrong about them, you can bet the work of other filmmakers can be detected. If this were just a standalone student film, either silent or accompanied by nothing more than a serviceable score, it would still be of visual interest, but it would probably be interchangeable with any number of other student films. It has something that they don’t, though; it has “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” a monstrous bookend to Neil Young’s break-your-heart song from three decades earlier. Neil’s version, even when hinting at catastrophe (“What if your world should fall apart?”), feels like support and reassurance from your closest friend. Jeff Tweedy wants to warn someone about heartbreak too, but it’s a warning issued from the inside; he’s the heartbreak headed her way, the Walter White in Skyler White’s unforgettable formulation that “Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.” I’m in the middle of my third or fourth rewatch of Breaking Bad as I write, so that line is still fresh in my mind. Another quote, this one from Mike Ehrmantraut:
What you may not know about meth heads, or maybe you do, they’re kind of unpredictable.
Not a bad description of the zonked-out local that Todd Terje’s “Inspector Norse” video follows around town for a few hours, one Marius Solem Johansen, the 27-year-old “owner and proprietor of a tanning salon” (according to a piece on the RX Music website). Terje is Norwegian, and I assume Johansen and his tanning salon are too. Johansen is not, strictly speaking, a meth head; in the “Inspector Norse” clip we see him whip up “a concoction of legal household chemicals (that combine) to make this weird mind-altering substance.” It may as well be meth, though, and the whole ritual of producing his “Inspector Norse Special,” from the acquisition of ingredients from a big box store to the cooking process itself, looks very much like a day in the life of Breaking Bad’s Walter White and Jesse Pinkman–and, it may be worth noting, Terje’s video was posted on YouTube June 19, 2012, less than a month before Breaking Bad began its fifth and final season.
“Inspector Norse” itself is a hypnotically catchy,***** multi-layered dance epic. I’d classify it as EDM and leave it at that–it’s electronic, and it’s dance, and it’s music–but the micro-taxonomy of dance music this century is a science that leaves me both baffled and tremendously amused. I’d plow through two or three dozen of these songs every December, usually picking off one or two for my year-end list, and I was left awestruck by the accompanying descriptions and categorizations. I’m sure that “Inspector Norse” more accurately belongs to some sub-subgenre of EDM that came and went in the blink of an eye. For me, it’s Manuel Göttsching’s “E2-E4” and Rhythim Is Rhythim’s “Strings of Life” and Inner City’s “Do You Love What You Feel”: beautiful and propulsive and imbued with twilight, a journey into sound and space and the great beyond, an infinite vista of serenity-now in all directions.
Sinister, too–violent, even–and that’s the part of “Inspector Norse” I think the video methodically builds towards. It begins almost pastorally: Solem puttering around his backyard in a housecoat, smoking a cigarette and reflecting, in voiceover (Norwegian with subtitles), about what makes him happy:
My passion for music…It’s really about me loving to dance. And there are certain types of electronic music that give me the urge to dance, and I feel I have to dance when I hear it.
On cue, and against a quick combination tracking shot/dolly zoom,****** the intro whoosh of “Inspector Norse” starts up. Some quick shots of the local geography–a series of suburban streets, a soccer field, an industrial parking lot–then Solem speed-walking through the neighborhood, headphones on, trying out certain dance moves along the way. He waves to a passing car, though there’s no indication that it’s anybody he actually knows; he seems to be a bit of a flake. Next stop, a bowling alley; positioned in front of an impressive wall rack mounting a few dozen pairs of shoes, Solem’s headphones are still on and he’s still dancing. He bowls by himself at one of the end lanes–a group of bowlers many lanes over can be seen in the background staring at him–and he’s pretty good; pins fall for a strike as he dances away. He plays a little pinball, and at 1:20 there’s a striking shot of him sitting alone at a table eating a hamburger. He looks sidelong at us impassively, seemingly all too aware of the absurdity of his daily routine. Is this any kind of a life?
In voiceover–he’s back at his house again–Solem fills in some backstory:
I was planning to leave this place too when I was done with high school. But then my dad got sick, so I felt staying here was the right thing to do.
A quick glimpse of the two of them, Solem and his dad, sitting silently on a couch–they may or may not be staring at some stuffed-animal ornament–then we see Solem out in the field again, dancing away for the edification of two horses that look on. There’s a shot of him petting one of them, the most meaningful interaction he’ll have with another living thing for the duration of the video.
Solem next heads over to an AZ big-box store******* to pick up some supplies (dancing up and down the aisles, of course). He returns home where, donning a surgical mask and yellow protective gloves, he pours something labeled “Bio” into a pan and heats it up–the intrigue picks up considerably. “Inspector Norse,” to this point, has been bubbly and perky; new sounds appear (or they’re multiplied and layered differently), Solem gets into some kind of a clown-jester costume, a strobe-light starts flashing, and his dance moves become sharper, twitchier, more cathartic. Whatever the inner demons were that had to be expelled, they’ve presumably been driven out; Solem is left depleted, flaked out on a sofa and blubbering tears. The strobe continues flashing, and he lifts a hand to his forehead, grief-stricken like he’s Max Von Sydow in a Bergman film. Nowhere left to go except out into the night, babbling to himself and running down the road directly into a car’s headlights (three little bulbs attached to the shoulders of Solem’s get-up create an inverted mirror image of the oncoming headlights). Other people appear here and there, but Solem’s interaction with them is minimal as he keeps moving towards…something. The night ends with him staring deep into his own eyes in a mirror. In what almost serves as a coda, the video’s final minute finds Solem biking to the beach (I assume it’s the following day) for something closer to the pastoral mood of the first minute: he dances against the backdrop of an oceanside sundown. “Inspector Norse” finishes, Solem stares out across the water, then he faces us. We’ve seen a full day’s worth of the absurd rituals of this guy’s life, but his eyes still keep watch over secrets we’ll never know.
There’s actually a second video for “Inspector Norse” that I love,******** obviously unauthorized but which also was posted in 2012 and is up to 80,000 views on YouTube (2.2 million for the official clip). Like Feist’s “1234” video, it’s another variation on the flash-mob craze circa 2010, its ingenuity matched only by how much I imagine it must have cost to finance (relatively speaking). This one–search “Inspector Norse (Dancing Edit Ctje)”–follows another dancing space cadet for the duration of Terje’s song, but this guy’s travels are a little more extensive than Marius Solem’s. In a series of trans-continental tableaux of a few seconds each, we see him hook up with small groups of people in countries from every corner of the world–India, Bhutan, Northern Ireland, Zanzibar, Australia, the Netherlands, Kuwait, Mexico, Iceland; that covers the first minute–as they dance to “Inspector Norse” against the backdrop of various landmarks and photogenic settings, everybody held together in the centre of the frame by spontaneous dance moves ranging from graceful to inspirationally clunky, sometimes both at once. His tour of the globe rolls on breathlessly: Spain, Madagascar, Argentina, Zambia, Turkey, Fiji, England, Sweden. I’m reminded of something Greil Marcus once wrote about the Reducers’ “Let’s Go,” an obscure mid-‘80s power-pop song out of Minnesota: “They only have to name a place to leave it.”********* I don’t know who was footing the bill, but unless somebody owned his own airline, none of this came cheap. Highlights abound: oceanside with the kids of Wainivilase, Fiji; our intrepid tour guide dancing solo somewhere inside a building in the Demilitarized Zone in Korea while a soldier looks on; the women of Gurgaon, India, who finish with a perfectly executed little flourish that stands out strikingly amidst all the craziness; our guy all alone again and underwater in Vava’u, Tonga. It all culminates at the four-minute mark where you’re inside Nellis Airspace in Nevada, with a dozen people floating around like in Kubrick’s 2001. I bet I’ve watched all or parts of this video a hundred times. I continue to use it when I’m out on a supply-teaching job and I have to do a few minutes of DPA (daily physical activity) with young grade-school kids. It’s the one situation where you can catch me dancing like a blithering idiot.
I saved these two videos–Toren Hardee’s for “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” the “Inspector Norse” clip with Marius Solem–for the very end of this blog/book because they might well be the first two I’d show to someone if I wanted to make the case that the most imaginative, most surprising, most artistic videos ever made are largely hiding in plain sight these days on YouTube, many of them forgotten if they were ever noticed at all. You won’t find them on one of those CNN decade-in-review specials, you probably won’t find them on a Rolling Stone countdown, and you certainly won’t find them on whatever’s still left of MTV or MuchMusic. A few of them definitely had commercial considerations built into their conception–the videos by Lauryn Hill, Green Day, Tracey Ullman, and others that I’ve written about were attached to hit singles, and those are the ones you probably do remember–but many more were just larks, a chance for less popular artists to mess around on somebody else’s dime. And a number of them weren’t really even videos at all, not in the sense of an “official” release overseen by the artists and their record companies to support newly available music; they were either made long after the fact (Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”), or they were the work of fans who had nothing whatsoever to do with the artists or their record companies. Of all the videos here, those are the ones I most want to convince readers to seek out. These enthusiasts uncover things in the songs they hijacked that I’m quite sure the artists themselves didn’t know were there.
One more to go. And just to call into question everything I’ve just said, this one was a big hit, the accompanying video was 100% official, and I don’t think it’s been forgotten, at least not by anyone who saw it when it was all over MTV and MuchMusic the year of its release. Imaginative, surprising, and artistic still apply. And profound–it presents a version of life that may make you stop and wonder if you’re living yours right.
*Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is an object lesson itself as to why songs, rather than albums, became my frame of reference for pop music sometime in the late ‘80s: the three songs on there that are my favourites–“Kamera” and “Heavy Metal Drummer” the other two–dwarf the other eight to the point where I can’t remember how even one of them goes.
**I don’t know if the question mark is meant as a self-deprecating admission that what you’re seeing doesn’t rise to the level of a real music video–not likely–or if it’s more of a legal smokescreen, coyly suggesting that the creator isn’t really sure if he’s allowed to do this without permission.
***”College rock”–does anyone ever use that term anymore, even to describe stuff from 30 years ago? Wikipedia: “rock music that played on student-run university and college campus radio stations located in the United States and Canada in the 1980s and 1990s.” Which would definitely apply to Wilco, although, when I hosted two different campus radio shows in the ‘80s and ‘00s (on two different stations), I don’t think I ever played them myself.
****I’m going to take “I done gone and made this fer my film class” at face value; the internet wasn’t quite the swamp in 2008 that it is today, so I’ll trust that Hardee was an actual person, and not the Russian-sponsored A.I. bot you might wonder about in 2024.
*****A word I generally try to avoid, cutting as it does six different ways. I compared “Inspector Norse” to Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” on my 2012 Pazz & Jop ballot, but I was mostly kidding. “Popcorn” is head-in-a-vice catchy; “Inspector Norse” is the kind of catchy that feels liberating.
******Roy Scheider in his chair watching the second shark attack in Jaws; Jimmy Stewart looking down in Vertigo; De Niro and Liotta sitting in a diner in Goodfellas. You know the shot.
*******Googling “AZ Norway store” turns up nothing; looks like a Costco or Sam’s Club.
********And even a third, although this one’s a performance clip from the 2014 Oya Festival in Oslo, not a video proper. No surprise that I picked Terje’s song as my favourite of the decade.
*********The first entry in the very first “Real Life Rock” column Marcus did for the Village Voice, actually.
we don't want to know 