Black Lips "Modern Art" Music Video Review

Black Lips "Modern Art"

Music Video Review

By our guest blogger, Nick Hanover

Any video by Black Lips has the unfortunate problem of having to live up to the band's reputation. Live, Black Lips are known for the type of antics that would make Iggy Pop blush, such as when they got themselves banned from India after stripping naked. How can your videos not be deathly dull in contrast to such a fearful live history?

Even so, the band's "Modern Art" video is about as exciting and original as Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo and not even half as funny. Opening with a "trippy" smokey image of some kind of squid or cuttlefish, "Modern Art" only gets worse from there. Looking like it was edited in iMovie while some stoner left the sepia effect on, "Modern Art" has all the action of a poorly dubbed Care Bears episode. There's, of course, a bar. Purple smoke is everywhere. People are getting drunk and squeezing roosters. Then comes archival footage of, uh, airplanes and bombings behind the boys of Black Lips dressed as what I can only describe as hillbilly Jihadists.

Is it meant to be offensive? Funny? Cutting edge satire? Who fucking knows. The cuttlefish makes a triumphant return for no particular reason as the video goes back to the bar and then everything anticlimactically ends.

Yes, everything about Black Lips is meant to be dumb. The band revels in its stupidity. It turns idiocy into a revolutionary action. But stupid is not to be equated with dull and the band would be wise to remember that. Frankly, when we're in the middle a sudden resurgence of music videos, where smart artists are seeing YouTube as a massive opportunity, it simply makes no sense that an outfit as dangerous and unpredictable as Black Lips would allow themselves to be so boring. Unless, of course, that is the punchline to this particular joke.

The video is below. Thoughts?