Jamie Brisick: Listen all y’all!
Drunken ruminations on the many reasons why ‘Sabotage’ and other Spike videos totally rock.
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Several nights ago I drank three-quarters of a bottle of bad red wine, slipped into a melancholic mood, and began tooling around on the Internet.
But before I sunk to lecherous lows involving Belladonna and a 16oz pot of Nivea, I decided to punch in ‘Jackass’, which changed the mood considerably. I laughed out loud as Wee-Man skated along the boardwalk dressed as an oompa loompa, Johnny Knoxville farted his way through yoga class, and Steve-O shot fireworks out of his ass. I watched the opener to Jackass: The Movie three times in a row, and marvelled at how much each of their characters are conveyed, what with the elbows and head punches and American flag G-string. Most of all I was completely cheered up, lighthearted, sitting up straight. “No one in the world is having more fun than the Jackass,” I would tell anyone who would listen for the next week.
This is a theme that runs through Spike Jonze’s music videos. They exude humour, mischief and the refusal to grow up. The first one that comes to mind is ‘Sabotage’ by the Beastie Boys. As a seventies American kid, this is powerful on several levels. I’m reminded of Starsky and Hutch, Baretta, SWAT and Hawaii Five-0. The tone and urgency of the song is pure nineties, but the moustaches and suits and mock screen credits belong to the seventies. It’s an incredibly fun, high-energy video, but for me, and I suspect for many of my contemporaries, it is also nostalgic. The knife fight, car explosion and guy getting tossed off the bridge remind me not of the real-life, firsthand experiences of my youth, but rather the ones I watched on TV, often with a big bowl of chocolate chip ice cream on my lap and my beloved, frequently tortured sister sitting next to me. With flashing red lights and chase scenes and hatchets through doors, it opens something tender, something unexpected.
And then there’s the jolting, haphazard camera work. It puts the viewer in the position of the pursuer, or possibly one of the dicks. It is not a neutral eye but rather a deeply entrenched one. You feel like you’ve snorted a line of that coke that shows up on screen for a flashing second. And don’t get me started on the donut. A lesser director might be accused of falling into cliché, but in this case cliché is the whole point — post-modernist self-mockery, or something of the sort.
But above and beyond the visuals is the song. I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan until ‘Sabotage’. It oozes a kind of contained hysteria. It makes you want to rob liquor stores. Or put on a fake moustache and fat tie and go running through downtown LA.
Another of his videos, ‘What’s Up Fatlip?', is simple and charming and as much a showcase for LA’s palm tree-lined backstreets as it is the wandering Fatlip, who continually gets the bad end of the stick. It feels unchoreographed, on the fly. You get the sense that they’re making it up as they go.
Which could also be said of Spike. He is an autodidact. That is, his education has been more about improvisation, finding a line in a stretch of sidewalk, a ledge, a bench, a rail and a curb, than, say, putting in long hours at a serious college. He was spawned from the heathen world of surf/skate/snow/BMX. To use a horribly trite expression, he’s one of us.
The fact that he’s reached such soaring heights validates the whole tribe. He is living proof that this skewed way in which we see the world (curbs invite mental flip tricks, waves induce imagined high-line streaks and direction changes) can in fact be parlayed into other mediums. Some years back I was smoking a lot of pot and reading a lot of Timothy Leary. After ingesting his essay ‘The Evolutionary Surfer’ I got onto the idea that rather than be locked into surfing literally, that dance, that improv, that ability to redirect — the poetic, metaphorical aspects of waveriding, in other words — should not be confined to the water. The ‘evolved surfer’ should be able to weave his way across the wave, step off onto shore, and walk into the world, applying these waterborne instincts into all facets of his life.
Spike seems to very much embody this.
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Listen all y’all! (text) by Jamie Brisick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (1)
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The only Beasties songs I like are the ones that have been accompanied by amazing videos eg. Intergalactic, Five Boroughs, Three MCs and One DJ.