12
01
06
Faithless: Bombs
The video for Bombs by UK group Faithless contains powerful, thought-provoking imagery. Which is probably why it’s been banned by MTV*.
*I have not been able to confirm the ban via any news organization, but that’s the word on the blogs and elsewhere:
They have a thing on MTV Hits where you can ask any question you like via TXT, so I asked why MTV had banned the video :-) They actually aired it and answered! Here is what MTV said: “No official statement has been made, but Faithless ‘Bombs’ has most likely been banned for being too violent, political and/or controversial !!!
[tags]music[/tags]
December 1st, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Wikipedia confirms the ban.
December 2nd, 2006 at 12:49 pm
What a lush, captivating song – musically, thematically, even narratively! The parallels and connections in the lyrical back-and-forth and in the imagery of the video (normally a lot of throwaway dancing baloney in most music videos) are rich in tension:
* The close tracking of parallel military-industrial phenomena (the helicopter framed by the roller coaster loop, the F-15 launching from an aircraft carrier and the small boy tossing a toy glider), mimicking the de facto industrial policy of the US and other industrialized countries since WWII;
* The compelling North-South, White-Brown dynamic that takes the classic blues/funk/hip hop lyrical back and forth and passes it through the strangely appropriate filter of nerdy New Wave styling;
* The musical style itself, with its powerful echoes of the ambivalence that accompanied the original post-punk new wave (techno-fetishism wrapped up in angsty machine alienation).
In one rhyming pair, they managed to explain just what’s wrong with the neoconservative folly of the absurd ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in Afghanistan and especially Iraq: “I’m gonna bury my wife and dig up my gun/My life is done so now I got to kill someone”.
I actually got shivers listening to (and watching) this video. In my cranky, generation-gapping old age, I didn’t think anyone was making music this good anymore. I even like how, since techno has run its course and hit up against the reductio ad absurdum of 180bpm trance and chaotic drill-n-bass, it has once again become possible for a serious artist to use electronica to make a well-crafted, thinkin’ person’s pop song.