July 30, 2005
The Case
Although if allowed I would watch them until my retinae melted, most music videos aren't very "good." When they are "good," it's usually because a) it captures the song's affect well, or b) the performer is trés charismatic, or c) lots of hot people, or d) the video's visually arresting, or e) hip-hop dancing and choreography is my jam. Sometimes these reasons overlap, especially b and c, or c and e.
It's quite rare that a video will actually show me how to hear the song better; the only superb case I can think of until now is Michel Gondry's clip for Kylie's "Come Into My World," which is not only a casually staggering bit of temporal mind-fucking, but an irreducibly elegant explication of the aesthetic philocophy behind the pop song, particularly the multi-tracked vocal that has so thoroughly shaped modern singles.
Dave Meyers' clip for Missy's "Lose Control" isn't quite that insightful (in part for being less casual; Meyers' lighting is always so portentous. Dude, we all like Mark Pellington-Romanek, get over it), but it's pretty fucking great. I haven't had much use for the arbitrary surrealism of Meyers' previous work with Missy, often because, aside from a vague parallel to Missy's presumed "weirdness," the clips didn't seem to have interesting relations with the music (look: bees! look: a dancing child!). But this one, co-directed with Missy, makes the song about a dozen times more interesting (and it wasn't dull to start with).
The main thing that holds the clip together is Step dancing, of the sort practiced competitively in African-American frats and sororities — though each section of the video varies the style, and the clothing that goes with it, from the highly gestural moves of the behoodied and begloved contempories, to the quite astonishingly-costumed passage with Ciara et al done up in clothes pointedly alluding to the plantation era: singers in ruffled gowns, dancers shirtless in suspenders and long shorts. That is, the ladies are dressed as mistresses of the manor, the guys as field workers — even though everyone seems to be a person of color. Slave color, that is. This alone is absolutely compelling, the idea that such a narrative could be retold not as a race but as a gender drama, or as a voice/body drama.
But it's only one section, and there are several. They exist at a fascinating balance of likeness (the general dance style, the nature of the cast, the velocity) and difference (the costumes, the specific dance styles and casts, the film stocks and lighting). And fairly swiftly one notices how many different parts the song has. Many many parts. This is one complicated song, and the complications pile on each other at breakneck pace without ever going muddy, without even seeming all that boggling.
It's not like a prog song, Bohemian Karnevil, with grinding time-signature changes and total stylistic shifts: it's a singular track, a hip-hop song with a fixed tempo. Can she work it? She can Kraftwerk it! But the Cybotron lick isn't as steady as I thought it was when I heard it on the radio; it comes and goes, rapping turns to singing and back with implausible frequency, the melody shifts, sounds drop in and out. I don't recall so many hooks in one song since "Semi-Charmed Life."
If this song is about anything, it's about the dramatic tension between hip-hop and r&b, which is one of the things Missy has been about since she couldn't stand the rain. But it's not just "you can't tell if I'm a rapper or a singer"; Missy's 37 chambers past that. This is a constructivist tower of half the possible things you can do with those categories, no one gesture lingered over, each humming with the conflicting desires to be like and be different, to join or to go flying off.
Missy's drama, which is the drama of the generic in urban pop (and perhaps the drama of identity itself, what the hell), and the tensions it produces, and the historical imagination that gives the drama much of its charge, has never been brought into such expressive clarity as in this video. In the relations it maintains between is shifts, oscillations, divergences, it's a clip about what makes Missy's musical vision so singular and astonishing; a clip, ironically, about why the categories of genre are so undecideable, so that everyone has to puzzle over which VMA it should be nominated for.
That is to say, Missy (and this is what Meyers helps catch) is a truly dialectical artist: songs like this defy the fixing-in-place of songs like this. The very art she makes destabilizes the field it arrives into, and that instability becomes the topic without ever abandong the dance beat. It's never just a position piece, nor is it a position; one result is that institutions committed to fixing things in their correct positions can only look foolish. Best Rap video, best Hip-Hop video, best Dance video, best R&B video? Whatever, dude, good luck.
Posted by jane at July 30, 2005 05:24 AM | TrackBack