A Photographic Solution_essay_and_image

My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, and Lush were three British rock bands prevalent during the late 1900’s. These three bands were some of the most notable that helped coin the term “shoegazing”, a genre classified by a detached and non-linear method of creating, performing, and displaying music. Although these three bands were unorthodox in their techniques and defy a definitive label, comparing their music videos side by side reveals what makes each unique and distinctive; all of these videos, however, can easily be described as art.

My Bloody Valentine’s song “Soon” is a nearly soporific blend of white and blue. The entire music video exists in a state of “almost”: we can almost make out the lines of the dancer’s arms, we can almost see the detail in the guitarist’s hands, we can almost see the shadows of the woman’s face. Everything is cast in white besides the few black outlines of objects, and because everything is slowed, the objects leave blue echoes where they once were. The warmest color in the images is the red guitar, and it’s always distinctive against every other thing. It’s nearly ethereal to watch as the woman makes movements as though she’s dancing, but our limited concept of her from her image’s overexposure makes her vague and hard to grasp. Because we can’t see the outline of most things in the video, we infer what’s happening in that space and zone out with the music because there’s no definitive thing to focus on. As I watched, I found myself mimicking the movements of the images that appeared, especially the repetitive nodding from a particular recurring woman. Her nodding was calming, as if she were simultaneously bobbing her head to the music, dozing into sleep, and telling the watcher everything was all right.

Cocteau Twins’ song “Lorelei” is much more hallucinogenic than “Soon” and much less tangible. More prominently featuring distorted guitar and reverb, “Lorelei”’s music video is comprised of snippets of videos that have no particular or obvious tie to the song at all. Each image is over saturated and hosts extreme shadows and highlights, creating a nonlinear and highly subjective. Adding to this disconcerting experience come from the lyrics; warped, spoken in soft syllables, and blended into the instrumental portion of the track, I wasn’t aware the singer was speaking in English until I looked up the lyrics. The discordant images accompanying the nondescript music allows for a type of subjective experience that is completely deviant from the typical music video today. I personally felt that “Lorelei” was the most psychedelic of the three art pieces, and it left me amped up and ready to move.

The third and last: “De Luxe” by Lush. Perpetually wreathed in flame, this music video is immediately opposite from “Soon”’s calming white and blue aesthetic. Red takes the forefront against muted backgrounds and clothes to create an aggressive and loud display, one that leaves you struggling to keep up with the ever-changing images. The camera is unendingly rotating in varying directions around the lead vocalist (whose hair is flame red), and this paired with a faint spinning animation in the center of the screen left me dizzy and disoriented. The instruments in “De Luxe” are heavier and more metallic, a complete divergence of the ethereal and otherworldly sensation garnered from the preceding videos. Along with actually comprehensible lyrics, this song is a stark comparison to the near lullaby that was “Soon”, but its psychedelic montage of image upon image overlaid on one another and light patterns flashing against faces ties back to “Lorelei” thematically.