Transmissions From The Videodrome

Pre-internet and cable, the common-or-garden pop promo was confined to mainstream terrestrial TV and thus subject to the same restrictions as any other daytime scheduling. From the Stones’ ‘Undercover of the Night’ to The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, videos that strayed outside the standard pre-watershed boundaries got restricted airplay, but lack of exposure was usually more than compensated for by word of mouth and tabloid controversy. Anyways, you could always count on Channel 4 to air the offending item in the wee small hours, rendering it a TV Event or a Watercooler Moment or whatever marketing terminology you favour. These days you can go online and pretty much watch what you want, when you want. Nothing’s shocking, as Jane says.

Recent videos by Lady GaGa and MIA employ similar shock tactics, but achieve ends that that couldn’t be more different. The former’s ‘Telephone’, directed by Jonas Akerlund (who previously stirred up fuss with videos for the aforementioned Prodigy, plus the Cardigans and Rammstein), has to be one of the most cynical pop promos ever made. In the video, Ms GaGa – a moderately talented performance artist who has managed to spin an entire industry out of a few decent dance tunes – is incarcerated in a women’s prison populated by every pubescent masturbation cliche in the book: bull dyke biker chicks, blaxploitation afro babes, androgynous greaser brunettes. Cue requisite semi-nudity and self-referential I-told-you-she-didn’t-have-a-dick ‘jokes’ all wrapped in a hi-gloss re-imagining of 1970s Times Square midnight movie fare that makes Tarantino look like Tarkovsky. The clip’s makers will probably defend it as transgressive art or post-feminist ironic commentary or some such hogwash instead of just fessing up to courting the LCD hand-shandy fantasies of your average 13-year-old.
MIA’s ‘Born Free’ is a whole other story. Brutal, bloody and at times genuinely scary, the nine-minute film portrays a near-future totalitarian nightmare akin to John Hillcoat’s Ghosts of the Civil Dead or Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, set in an urban wasteland that looks like an even more deserted Detroit. The premise seems borderline ludicrous at first: a bunch of redheaded young males are rounded up and transplanted by bus to a gulag where they are subjected to turkey shoot target practice by armed and armoured goons. Redheads? you might well think, but that I reckon is the point. Any form of ethnic or religious persecution, viewed from an extra-terrestrial POV, would seem just as arbitrary and just as barbaric. The track itself – a thundering riff on Suicide’s ‘Ghost Rider’ – seems incidental, placed low in the mix. The result is akin to a transmission from Cronenberg’s Videodrome or David Foster Wallace’s Suffering Channel. But one thing thing’s for sure: it’s not titillating.