The Duke On The Work Of Chris Cunningham
Used to be a time when music videos did a couple things, and didn't go getting themselves in a state about the ART or similar diversions. There would be a song playing, thus supplying the music element, and then maybe we would see the Madonna or the Thin Lizzy or whoever, and that was all the visual layer we needed. Everyone was happy. Ain't nobody complaining about we needs to see some robots sexing or kids chasing a pensioner around a housing estate.
Nowadays, though, no-ones happy unless these music adverts start with a bout of scripted dialogue along the lines of motherfucker and ho and so on, and then have all the SFX and the CGI and all that malarkey, in order to make whatever the hell dreary trip-hop nonsense is assaulting our ears seem all the more amazing. This amazing bit is added via the robots sexing and the SFX.
Usually, The Duke has no truck with this pretentious nonsense, and harks for the days when folks had their heads a little more south of the rectum, and it was all about the music, man, is what. The music got boring as hell though, so to be honest, a bit of the robot sex wouldn't go amiss most times.
And this is where an individual by the name of Chris Cunningham comes in.
You might have seen some of this demented son of a bitch's work. Like the Madonna video for Frozen where she's in the desert and so on and then there's a few more of her and she's all in black and has her hands tattooed like Mary Magdalene in Last Temptation Of Christ. Or maybe you saw those Playstation adverts with the Scottish girl whose eyes are really far apart, with the pigtails. Or what about the Aphex Twin video for Come To Daddy, a motherfucking deranged apocalyptic nightmare that has a bunch of kids all looking like old Aphex, chasing a pensioner and a dog, and then some damn thing crawls out of a telly like in Ringu or Videodrome, some bloody skinny thing with teeth sharp as The Duke's observations and all skinny with the ribs showing and so on.
He also did the Bjork one, where she's a robot, and then gets on with the sexing along with another robot. This one was quite entertaining.
The point of all this is that somehow these chancers what do the music adverts have had a load of respectability slapped onto them, possibly on account of the motherfucker and the robot fondling. Now, we can buy pristinely packaged DVD sets what are called things like The Work Of Chris Cunningham or The Work Of Michael Gondry or The Work Of Spike Jonze. This intrigued The Duke no end, this series of the old digital versatile discs, but this Cunningham mofo was the only one I felt like shelling out for, by which I mean I bought it on sale.
Now, first off, I couldn't care less about most of the music in these things, unless I tried really really hard, and to be honest, I can't be bothered even thinking about it. But the visuals this Cunningham fella utilises are nothing short of inspired, possibly by some malevolent demon who lives at the centre of the universe. He's got a Fincher kinda thing going on, being fond of the bleached-out look and the rain and the disturbing imagery. And he's got an imagination like Bosch after a night of absinthe fuelled hooker devouring coke-snorting mayhem. Some of these are truly disturbing, some of them are kinda funny, but all of them are at least interesting. The weakest one here, for Squarepusher's Come On My Selector, manages to do the unthinkable by making scarily intelligent children and dogs having their brains swapped with humans and big fucking guns seem terribly dull. But it's still worth a watch, even if you're unlikely to wanna play it too many times. Bit like the song, in fact.
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