Monday, April 4, 2016

Looking for a music video (I think), please help

So I walked into a public place, the sort to have unremarkable inoffensive family friendly stuff on the TV.

At some point I take a look.  A woman is looking in the mirror, touches it, seems confused by it, ends up looking at her hand, same confusion.  I don't understand, possibly because I'm not hearing the lyrics.

I think it's when she starts poking an orrery (a model solar system) in the apartment that I realize that the reason for her confusion with the mirror, and her hand, is that she's probably meant to be an alien unused to human form.

When guy returns to the apartment she ups the orrery with some kind of holographic display thingumabob between her hands that shows a whole damned star field or something.

No time though, scary goons follow close behind, video ends, I don't catch the name.

I figure, how hard could it be to work out what this was?  How many music videos in current circulation involved a woman poking an orrery?

And the answer seems to be: no fucking clue because there's no decent way to search music videos by non-musical content.  There doesn't seem to be an indecent way either.

So I'm asking you:
Any idea what it was that I saw?

I'd be interested to see the whole video, and I might even be interested in the song that it was made for (though I kind of doubt it; what I like and what's popular parted ways before I was born.)

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[added:]

Thanks to Redcrow for finding out what it was: Something Better by Audien featuring Lady Antebellum*.



I probably saw it starting around two minutes in with the orrery appearing around 2:10/2:11.  What I saw was probably over by 2:40 or so.  So I caught around 18.6% of the video.  Probably the best 18.6 percent though.

Anyway, it really bugged me not knowing what it was that I saw.  I am bugged no longer.

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* There's a problem with Lady Antebellum.

The problem is the name.  I don't know of anything bad about the band besides the name, and the way that they came by the name was itself fairly tame, but the name is still a problem.

"Antebellum" literally means "prewar" but in the United States it has a special meaning because it's used to refer to a specific war.  Generally also a specific region.  With respect to the region, when I read that the band members picked the name because they were photographing antebellum houses and someone commented that it would be a cool band name, I can be fairly certain that they weren't doing it north of the Mason-Dixon line.  Probably a safe bet that they weren't doing it in California either.

The war is the US Civil War.  The region isn't quite identical to the Confederate States of America because what the word "antebellum" really refers to in the US is slavery.

Remember when race based chattel slavery was completely ok and, with the exception of criminals like Harriet Tubman, the only opposition it faced was philosophical?  Remember the places that were built in a particular style only because of the supply of forced labor that they could use and that would be living in the general area?  Antebellum.

The antebellum houses that the band was photographing, for reasons that don't appear in the bio I just looked up, would be houses in an architecture style built on slavery.  Hence the regional limitation.  While the entire country was colluding in the massive crime that was slavery, for those in (for example) the northerly reaches the only effect it had upon their architecture was that they had money drenched in blood and human misery with which to pay for their buildings.  In the slave-holding areas things were different because the slaves were right fucking there.

And that's what the band name means: "Lady [time when it was legally and socially ok to have slaves]"  And that bothers me.

It is a cool band name.  It does have a nice sound to it.  But words don't exist in isolation.  If they did they'd be useless to us.  (How could we know what "chair" meant unless the word "chair" was connected to the thing chair?  That connection?  Lack of isolation.)  And thus the problem.  Antebellum means "back when slavery was ok (from the viewpoint of white people whose consciences were well restrained)" and thus it stops being a pretty word in spite of the nice sound it has.

[/added]

1 comment:

  1. I am no help but a few minutes on image search makes me more interested in the movie Prometheus...

    Also in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the protagonist comes across what seems to be a child playing with a magical orerry... but the truth is weirder than that...

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