Sonic Triumph of Kubrickian Glam

I've been listening to Roisin Murphy a lot since her break with Moloko. This 'exiled princess of glam' is in top form in this brilliant video of a superlative pop song (Overpowered). It is no coincidence that the former group she fronted for many years was called Moloko, for it directly acknowledged the huge influence of ACO both on the development of popular music (particularly Glam art-pop, from Bowie to Roxy, and razor synth pop). If Kubrick were still around, and made a pop video, this would be very close to it (even the lyrics are dispassionately machinic and neuroscientific!).

Clearly, the director of the video, Jamie Thraves (who has also made videos for such groups/musicians as Radiohead, Coldplay, Goldie, Manic Street Preachers, The Verve, etc) has studied Kubrick's films: the very first shot of the video directly references droog-Alex standing over the Tramp in the brutalist-concrete underpass near the start of ACO, while the sequence of shots of Roisin uneasily moving through night-time seedy London streets [creating a brilliant and uneasy tension between the seamless fantasy of glamour and the contrastingly seamy and mundane quotidian urban-social reality] cannot but uncannily remind us of Dr Bill Harford walking as if in an ontological daze through the equally blurry and disordered Manhatten streets in Eyes Wide Shut, following his encounter with Marion, the distraught daughter of a recently deceased client-patriarch. It's almost as if Roisin earlier picked up her magnificently outrageous costume at Milich's Rainbow Fashions - even her hat [actually designed by Schiaparelli] looks like one of the masks worn by the elite but degenerate guests at Somerton ...

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You forgot to mention that the song sounds like ''Dont Go'' by Yazoo played through a filter.It might have been acceptable in the 80's....But now?

Got anything else to sell? ;)


http://www.myspace.com/thekandytangerineman

I didn't 'forget', because it bears no relationship whatsoever to Alison Moyet's aggressively pastiche, adolescent-emoting, narcissistic 1980s grasping-predatory dirge. Whatever could you be thinking?

And BTW, whatever makes you imagine that 'now', that today's listeners are more exacting, more demanding, more critical, than those of 20+ years ago? That is to laugh.

I'm not 'selling' anything, little boy; on the contrary, as should be obvious to every dog on the street for the past three years hereabouts, that's actually the very insular raison d'etre of most posters on the Music section of this forum, which is why I've actually avoided it in principle for so long ...

Put a little more thought into your posts/responses here before hopelessly embarrassing yourself in future.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
That hat is quite excellent, like a marker for a video game character a la The Sims...

sims2.jpg
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Roisin used to live round the corner from me in Kilburn, near Cilian Murphy lol, all the Irish megastars.

I'm kindof in awe of what she does - I wouldn't listen to it regularly, it's too clean for me - but I do think it's almost unbearably good pop, she's almost unfathomable, I don't understand her raison d'etre. I think it's far less glam and far more classically new romantic, it's completely Leigh Bowery, completely alien in a way that certainly early Eurythmics were. I'd really like to meet her to see what goes on in her head, because there's obviously something that she's tapping into - is it pure fashion, maybe?, in a conceptual sense? - that she enjoys and is very good at, I just don't understand what she's doing, which is no bad thing. She could equally be one of those mad hyper intelligent Irish girls, the type that hold knives to your neck after three day drinking binges whilst reciting Hamlet backwards.

I think it's very hard if you're making film not to end up referencing Kubrick simply because his composition was so infectious. I don't quite understand the Moloko/Kubrick connection as well, other than surface. Good, in fact great video to that track, hadn't seen it before, thanks.


And that 'Indigo' track that Moloko did is one of the scariest pop tunes I've ever heard, k-punk's right on that.
 
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straight

wings cru
moloko never grabbed me as anything special but ruby blue was probably the album i listened to most last year, a spectacularly unusual pop record. the new material sounds a bit too straightforward for me without herbert there pulling the strings, would be ace if man got some remixes in
 

zhao

there are no accidents
it is a nice tune. reminds me a lot more of Saint Etienne than Moloko (or anything else).

i used to like the sweater album when i was 21 and really into drum'n'bass haha
 

Tyro

The Kandy Tangerine Man
I didn't 'forget', because it bears no relationship whatsoever to Alison Moyet's aggressively pastiche, adolescent-emoting, narcissistic 1980s grasping-predatory dirge. Whatever could you be thinking?


I was thinking of the tune dad.You know,the beat,the bassline,the riff,the tempo and the feel of the thing.As the vocal hook is completely anemic and forgettable,the result is a flat electropop souffle.It really is in need of a 'Kubrickian Glam''video to lift it.

A 'Sonic Triumph' it ain't!
 

28 Gun Nice Boy

Well-known member
I'm not 'selling' anything, little boy; on the contrary, as should be obvious to every dog on the street for the past three years hereabouts, that's actually the very insular raison d'etre of most posters on the Music section of this forum, which is why I've actually avoided it in principle for so long ...

Put a little more thought into your posts/responses here before hopelessly embarrassing yourself in future.

That's brilliant! Please post here more often; maybe you could contribute to the rolling Grime thread?
 
he probably doesn't care but

HMLT murked in that reply lol

Roisin is too much - she would get it easy...her voice is too much

and it just wouldn't be Dissensus if someone didn't prefer Ruby Blue ;)

the Kubrick stuff...Ima have to think about that though

can't believe she lived in the ends...

she is mad though

HMLT probably hates grime lol and some of that fact mag stuff is reeeeeeaching
 
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swears

preppy-kei
The video seems to me to be very similar to Spike Jonze's Da Funk promo for Daft Punk. With the surreal dog-man walking through the streets of New York and its dialogue and background noise mixed over the song.

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