This is really just an excuse to play a track from Estelle’s sophomore album, Shine, one of the year’s best pop soul records. Shine is as infectious as my worn through copy of Lauren Hill’s debut, before she picked up a guitar and decided to join the ranks of the tortured and sermonizing. It’s not the ideal track to pick (for that see the Cee-Lo collab “Pretty Please”), especially since Kanye’s flow consistently deflates his musical surroundings and his “moon/June” rhymes are fairly low hanging fruit. Actually that’s an overstatement, Kanye’s rhymes are, more often than not, of the “moon/moon” variety. As a video, it lacks coherent art direction and narrative, especially in the split-screen montages of various typical American boys, all of whom look like they’re doing ads for the Gap’s new edgy urban Ivy-leaguer line. Sure, black and white is always carries a certain entry-level morsel of cool cache, but for this song it’s cold and comparatively drab. The only part that captures some of this song’s buoyant Summer energy comes from the disconnected dance play between Estelle and her shadow, which provides sexy liquid movement in a video with static pictures of men backdropped with the kind of white void you’d expect from a near death experience. She’s too vibrant to be framed by such McArty deserted space that could just as easily sell a parka, a cheeseburger or Windsong perfume. And, if you can get John Legend in the video, why not have him pick up Kanye’s half of the duet.  Just saying.

I still can’t believe Roisin Murphy’s 2007 LP, Overpowered didn’t have the impact of other dance acts like Lilly Allen or M.I.A., but I suspect that’s due largely in part to the slow rehabilitation of disco as an genre of influence. For some, the image of thousands of people destroying disco LPs at radio personality, Steve Dahl’s, disco demolition still holds enough cultural power to keep disco in its place as some sort of decadent symbol of “establishment” pop. I hold out hope that artists like Murphy will erode the critical blindness involved in that kind of blanket gesture. Besides, old categories of the countercultural simply don’t map that easily onto what’s being done in the world of music today.

Murphy’s image has a certain retro-futurism, like a classic Hollywood starlet stumbling out of Bjork’s closet. Part of my fascination with this video stems from its naked self-deprecation. While many videos involve the realization of explosively egotistical fantasies of the artist as a supernatural being, Murphy sings the song to herself in a dingy diner. Sure, it’s a diner that happens to convert into a low rent mock-up of a Saturday Night Fever club, but does so only in her head. The patrons ignore her coquettish posturing on the furniture and continue on about their business. The video is a tongue-in-cheek contrast between reality and fantasy: eating alone versus starring in your own crisply choreographed “fuck off” song. Murphy excels in strangely compatible moods, like the four-to-floor dance single that’s full of melancholic loss and solitude. “Know Me Better” is essentially a daydream of how we all wish we handled painful break-ups: with unflappable independence, style, stride and humor. Walter Mitty meet Giorgio Moroder.

Founding Father and Santogold Inspiration

For starters, Santogold will be blowing up in iPod near you by the time you finished reading this. Though some may dismiss her as an M.I.A. dilution, I think she’s got every bit the defiance and skill of Ms. Arulpragasam, even if she has a more narrowly niched sense of hip-hop gone global. In this video, I think she plays with a lot of artistic mythology in setting up a persona of wise disconnection and power. 

I can’t personally comment on the connection between women and horses, though I do find it interesting that there’s an entire magazine and an apparently vibrant subculture devoted to the subject. I understand why people would be inclined to use them for all the mythical weight they bring to bear. I like that Santogold seems to be reconfiguring the artist in embattled but victorious terms. The positioning in the video suggests military portraiture. In fact, the first thing the opening image evoked for me, was painting of George Washington on horseback, with all the implied mastery of human over nature that comes from a majestic and gorgeous animal holding steady for a regal pose. Of course, the militancy of the video’s image is buttressed by two stiff dancers in the margin whose movements have more in common with martial parades than they do back-up dancing.

I guess I’m a stone cold sucker for images of artistic power, especially those that boldly suggest transcendence or flirt with the supernatural. The song is about the sacrifices people make in order to make art and the tortures of having a private world made public.  But throughout the bright and graphic scenes of dismemberment, vomit, and projectile goblin blood, Santogold never breaks a catwalk stride. She emerges from the fog nonplussed. Okay, maybe she should have stopped the stranger playing with the neon Play-Doh intestines, but I’m personally so enthralled by her triumphalism, that I tend to sweep away all the nicking moral niceties.