Hypnoprism

Momus' new album, Hypnoprism, has been available for some time as digipak CD and YouTube playlist. On his website, Momus explains:

The "hypnoprism" of the title is YouTube, a sort of hypnotic musical prism, the source of much of the inspiration for this album, and even some of the sounds. Hypnotised by watching his favourite music videos on YouTube, Momus made songs aspiring to the same qualities — that mysterious catnip which makes you want to play a pop song over and over, and commit it to memory — then immediately made videos for them and posted them.

Since I seem to be doing nothing but posting YouTube clips recently, I thought I'd actually compile my own hypnoprism of pop video catnip. I might repeat myself by including ones I've already posted (after all, isn't that part of the point?) with some of them, but I'll try and make sure that as many of them as possible contain moving images, and I'll try to choose 13, as there are 13 songs in Momus' Hypnoprism. I hope people will feel able to come back to this list while I am absent doing boring busy things, as I will probably increasingly be in the days and years ahead. Thank you.

Edit: Okay, I'm going to be confusing and add bits to this post at later times without regard to the logical sequence of the text. It's just occurred to me that there are hardly any songs below that I haven't posted before. That's fine, because it means they really are favourites of mine, but I suppose it might be tedious for those who've been reading my blog for a while, assuming that such exist, etc., so I thought I'd at least make this different by adding some comments to each clip. Also, I think I might try to compile another hypnoprism (which phrase should now be copyright to Momus), with completely new catnip songs, as in, new to me. I think I might have got a start on that earlier today. Anyhow…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_yQoXYY4As

Laurel and Hardy have, I suspect, saved my sanity on at least one occasion, and my suggestion for those who are teetering on the brink is to watch a Laurel and Hardy film. This clip is – to me at least – evidence that there has always been sex in cinema. It's not recent. The silver screen itself seems sexual, especially in the black and white days when actors appeared as incandescent ghosts, fickering emblems of desire. So, much as I disapprove, I think of Cinema Paradiso and it seems that what cinema has most notably bequeathed the world is the screen kiss. Tarantino insists that cinema was made for violence… Maybe, but increasingly I find Tarantino to be loud and boring.

In The Black Album, by Hanif Kureishi, one of the characters, about to masturbate, muses that pornography is like religion in that the effect is spoilt by humour. The truth of this observation is to be found in the 'sultry' looks of the models. 'Sultry', like 'macho' is laughable because it is serious.

And yet, this can't be the whole truth. Comedy and sex go together, don't they? (I imagine Woody Allen thinks so.) Maybe comedy marks a kind of third way between pornographic slavery and po-faced prudery. I don't actually know – it's just a wild stab in the dark.

Incidentally, I noticed a linguistic reference in the lyrics of this song that I have only previously known in Japanese. There is in Japanese a phrase obviously taken from English, "sutairu ga ii" – literally, "good style". For some reason, this refers to having a good figure. I thought it a rather odd expression, but notice that when the fella above sings, "Where did you get that style?" he is outlining the dancer's figure with his hands. Co-incidence? I wonder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne2yFQPYYmU

This is possibly my favourite YouTube clip of all time. Annette's face at about the point where she's singing (or miming to), "He's my mountain/He's my tree", defines 'winsome'. I 'shared' this clip with a friend a while back, through the medium of the Internet, and he commented, "You certainly have a penchant for the grotesque." I felt that, at last, someone had partially understood me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIJOO__jVo

From the pre-CGI age, when all that could be used for special effects were selotape, mirrors, sugar paper and vaseline, comes possibly the best pop video (and song) ever. I love everything about this. I love her tails, her coat, her ravishing seventies pallor, the skipping, erratic melody, the insistent bubblegum-pop rhythm, the pretentious DIY arthouse imagery spliced in here and there, the bald guitar guy, the ending in the tunnel, the pop-star-performing-to-a-mirror closing shot of Lene herself and her twisting V-sign. I could watch this all day if I were allowed to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTjJ11dm4TY

Ai Kago and Tsuji Nozomi dance like the hyperactive wind-up toys they are pretending to be. Garishly childish cabaret, with an insanely catchy chorus. The central pun of the chorus is also quite ingenious. "Suki" ('love' or 'like') slips seamlessly into "kisu" ('kiss'): "sukisukisukisu" etc. I'm not actually a big fan of J-pop, though some people might imagine that I am. When I was living in Japan I felt that most of it was a bloated, soulless mix of New Romantic and AOR. Occasionally I would hear something I liked on the radio and – hauntingly – find that I was unable to track it down. Does anyone out there know who did a song called, Akiramemasho? I think it was on the Kohaku competition at the end of 2002. I even heard an interesting song in a car show room once, but was too shy to ask what the music was they were playing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGmXb1xenrQ

What is generally called 'rhythm and blues' these days, but which seems to have almost nothing to do with what was originally called 'rhythm and blues' consists largely of people showcasing wanky saccharine warbling up and down scales as a kind of stand in for emotional expression. I'm not a musical taxonomist, and perhaps the comparison is not appropriate, but it seems to me that all of those contemporary 'R&B' artists I've heard lack the class and power as singers of this 13 (or 14?)-year-old doo-wop soprano.

When I first heard this song, or when I second heard it, I imagined the group was kind of manufactured as one of those 'make black music sugary and palatable to white people' kind of projects. I guessed that the implicit Christian message was imposed: "Let's get a juvenile to preach to other juveniles, as he'll have more credibility to them than we do." However, I don't actually know if this is the case, and it could be that the song was entirely the idea of Frankie Lymon and the band. In any case, it has a peculiar resonance to it that I can't explain. "It's easy to be good/It's hard to be bad". Is this ironic? Is it merely vapid? It doesn't seem quite either. There is something weirdly genuine about this.

Frankie Lymon, it seems, classier as a singer than the manufactured popular singers of our time, was also possibly further in private from the clean image of this song. At the age of ten – apparently – he supplemented his wages as a grocery boy by hustling prostitutes. At 25 he died of a heroin overdose.

To me this feels almost like the archetypal pop song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6dZgCR58qk

This song has a kind of rockabilly feel to it. I have a passing interest in rockabilly. I think that I am attracted to rockabilly in the same way that I am attracted to evil. Rockabilly seems in many ways the embodiment of evil. It is wild and conservative at the same time. I probably haven't explained that at all well. It's an angular music, anyway. Long flowing hair seems out of keeping with it. I imagine some weird inverted code of 'good' among rockabilly ranks that applies only to insiders. My very vague but lasting interest in rockabilly probably began when I heard the psychobilly band The Meteors when I was very young. The world of rockabilly seems an entirely closed world, like that depicted in Lovecraft's 'The Picture in the House'.

Messer Chups are apparently an experimental band, but there is still a whiff of this feel to them (and the title does have the word 'Satan' in it). Notice the B-movie aesthetic, too. I'm also reminded of Dave Stevens' Rocketeer picture based on Bettie Page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpgjAMahdko

I'm not sure I can really describe how this song affects me. In a way, it's a very corny, sincere kind of acoustic-guitar love song with a 'sensitive' yet rock'n'roll ethos to it. Nonetheless, it seems to have attained perfection somehow, and I just can't see the strings. I imagine this really is what it's like to be sincerely in love at the age of 13, taking everything very seriously, tremulous with uncertainty, ready to be heroic if necessary, idealistic, etc. "Rock'n'roll is here to stay/Come inside now, it's okay/And I'll shake you." No wonder her dad is 'on his back'.

Although this is a song in some ways about gentle joy, it has an 'unbearable lightness of being' feeling about it that just makes me want to slit my wrists. It's all just unbearable really. You know it's going to end in tears, and nothing will ever, ever be the same again. Will it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyuC6HBGtnk

If the previous song is what love feels like when you're 13, I suppose this must be what love is like when you're an adult, if there is such a thing as love when you're an adult. I've heard it said – or perhaps I'm making it up – that music is the most subjective of all the arts, and perhaps this is true, because often the songs I like the most are those I can say least about. I'm not sure really how to describe what this song does for me, and I probably shouldn't even if I could. I can make some incidental remarks, however, that the video, by Vladimir Ristic, seems to fit the mood of the song perfectly (which is something very few music videos seem to manage), that Sasa Zoric Combe is the god of harmonies, and that Kodagain must be the most underrated band on the planet. It was hard choosing one Kodagain video for this list, but I made myself a rule not to use more than one video per artist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyhoPds_Df0

It would hardly be fair if I stole Momus' word (Hypnoprism) and didn't include a Momus song. This song comes from what is possibly my favourite Momus album, Oskar Tennis Champion. There is a sequence of five songs on that album, starting with Beowulf that I find particularly enchanting in a Narnia-land-of-eternal-winter kind of way. Most of my favourite Momus songs are not on YouTube. For instance, in the sequence of songs I mention, I think that perhaps my favourite is Lovely Tree, which has the gorgeously melancholy lines:

Last night I wandered in a wasteland

I was abandoned to the snow

You came through forests thick with tangled undergrowth

With chicken soup, a Twix bar and some winter clothes

I could have chosen Ventriloquists and Dolls for this hypnoprism, but I suppose what swung it for me was the Beowulf video of clips from the film The Golem. Beowulf is a great song, anyway. It has on occasion made the nape of my neck prickle. Momus must know it's good, too, because every live show I've seen of his, but one, before the song was released, he has played this song. I don't really know what it's about, but it feels right, somehow. Also, it has the line "I am deformed" in it, which appeals to me. As well as appealed to because I indentify with the feeling, I can't help thinking it's like a line out of a porn film: "Oh my God, you're… deformed!" That kind of thing. I'm sure this is deliberate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjBwe6IL10o

I've just found this link about Kelli Ali's teeth. Someone there says something about her trying to be Bjork, too, which seems ridiculous. In what way, that she's female and sings? Anyway, I find Kelli Ali's teeth threatening. But in a good way.

I actually think that people generally have the wrong idea about acid, and that this video is what it really feels like. From what I've read.

I'm going to seem to contradict something I said before on this blog post, by saying that sexual content only really began in pop videos in the nineties. This is not really true, but the nineties was kind of when they started to bring on the dancing girls. And not just any dancing girls, but air-brushed lap-dancing girls. And since then it's become more or less obligatory for all pop videos to be shot on the premises of Spearmint Rhino.

Sugar is used as an additive in all kinds of food, now, even of the most unlikely sort, like baked beans, for instance. The same goes with air-brushed cage-dancers in pop music videos now. Honestly, I'm not a prude, but despite my low opinion of the pop video as an artform, when you look at the pop video before the nineties and after, it's almost an argument on its own that art and pornography aren't actually the same thing. Sugar is an addictive ingredient, but doesn't necessarily make the food satisfying. The same goes for… well, you can finish the sentence. Honestly, even indie guitar bands like Franz Ferdinand do it now. It was not thus, with upskirt shots and bending scantily clad girls that Bowie revolutionised the adolescence of so many.

Spin Spin Sugar, appropriately has just enough of this nasty additive; it's there, but it's not overdone. It is in harmony with the song and does not overpower the song. It's a balance that not many seem to achieve. I suppose mostly that pop artists don't have enough faith in their own songs any more to be able to say no to the GQ girls.

I should be working. I'll do the rest later…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbIpjlByKMM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj5NNNkGzj8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHHx8GYWHWw