Radio Silence

October 1 presents a lot of deadlines for me: three postdocs, article revisions for an academic journal, getting the dissertation all good to go for the deposit, and various job applications.  Ergo, I have to take a short break from writing things for fun.

Bad Cover Version will resume Thursday, October 2, 2008, and will keep to a regular schedule.

Bad Cover Version’s Bad Cover Versions: Lemonheads’ “Mrs. Robinson”

Bad Cover Version is going retro-90s today!  In addition to purchasing a plaid skirt and blue cords and even trying on a dress made of flannel (I put it back!  I realized I looked like I was wearing a lumberjack’s nightgown, if lumberjacks wore nightgowns), I heard something that reminded me of this cover.

The Lemonheads’ singer, Evan Dando, was the indie-rock pretty boy of the early 1990s.  He dated Winona Ryder.  He dated, but supposedly and infamously did not sleep with, Juliana Hatfield.  Kathleen Hanna wrote a weird zine about his fame.  He appeared in People magazine’s list of the 50 most beautiful people.

And then he became a crack addict.  Good-bye slacker sexpot fame!

The following cover of “Mrs. Robinson” was released in tandem with the video release of The Graduate.  Supposedly, the band hated it and didn’t want it to be released.  But why then shoot a video?  Why record it in the first place?   If they hated it, I completely understand.  I hate, hate, hated this version when it came out.

… On the other hand, I just listened to it, and I don’t find it as offensive as I once did.  Am I just nostalgic for the early 1990s?  Or have I heard it so many times that I have succumbed to its sound?

Soundscape NYC: Ft. Tryon Park

Soundscape (n): Composer R. Murray Schafer’s rather pretentious word for your sound environment.  Much used and abused in ethnomusicology.

Despite the snark in the above definition, I find “soundscape” to be a useful term, particularly when I go on walks in my neighborhood and pretty much always end up wishing that I’d brought along a tape recorder, just to preserve the awesomeness of what I hear.   I know that’s been done before in the world of pretentious avant garde music, and I don’t mean that I’d then put what I hear into some crap sound collage.  No, I just want to write it down to remember it.

Yesterday’s walk produced a prime example of the kind of thing I love.  While entering Fort Tryon Park, I heard a guy practicing an accordion near the playground.  That’s not all that unusual.  In fact, it’s kind of to be expected.

When I came back around from my giant, 3-mile loop that takes me around and doubles back and all that, I heard something strange and wonderful.  The accordion was now joined by two saxophones, and another accordionist.  And I could not tell what the hell they were doing.

That is a strange occurrence for me.  I can usually tell what kind of musical language people are speaking to each other.  In this case, it sounded for all the world like two avant garde musicians from The Kitchen had joined up with a pair of Norteno accordionists and were trading licks.  But, at the same time, it sounded like those licks were not quite being translated so much as misunderstood, transforming what could be a musical language into a cacaphony of polyphony, musical lines swooping in near imitation, cascading and clashing and not quite ever making sense together.

Anyway, this is not a post on popular music, but it’s pretty much all I’ve been able to think about musically since my walk yesterday.  I really want to know the back story for what I heard, whether it was just a bunch of dudes warming up, whether they knew each other, or whether it was some chance meeting.  But part of me relishes the mystery of finding a situation that I do not understand musically, of stumbling across something that makes me think about it a day later.

Solange: Retro-Soul from the House of Knowles

Following on yesterday’s post on disco, I’m entering the world of R&B-disco-pop, in the form of Solange Knowles.  In typical pop fashion, Solange’s new album blends a number of styles, but most notable about it is that she is taking the retro-soul-female-singer niche to the mainstream black audience.

Earlier this year, I attended the Experience Music Project’s annual Pop Conference.  At the panels on race, one topic seemed to reign supreme: the retro-soul revival.  Most of the panelists–heavy-hitting rock journalists, critics, and academics–debated this revival in terms of race, noting that it has been both produced and consumed by white people.  Mark Ronson, fancy-pants rich kid producer, Svengali to Amy Winehouse, curator of albums that sound just like those back in the day, bore the particular brunt of much of the criticism.  And I can see that–there’s always something irritating about some rich, white kid ripping off someone else’s culture, whether that’s Billburg hipsters appropriating the trucker hats and full beards of the redneck or Ronson’s faithful, yet fixed-in-time, recreations of soul music.

Nonetheless, one significant thing that was brought out in those panels was the question of audience.  The people who have bought Amy Winehouse’s music (and especially those who dig further into the retro-soul category) are generally white, middle-class kids, judging by the audiences at her shows (back before her visa was revoked).*

All of which brings me to Solange Knowles, and how she is a very different representation of the retro-soul world than either Ronson (who did work on her album) or notorious trainwreck Winehouse.  As we all know, the Knowles parents have firmly represented their clan as responsible, hard-working, Christian, and united together.  This is also an iteration of blackness that has resonated with mainstream pop audiences–black and white–since Motown, whose owner Berry Gordy, Jr. forced his young singers to take dance, manners, and elocution classes.  The Knowles family may have controlled Destiny’s Child with an iron fist in a velvet glove, but they ensured that the group was popular with a wide audience.

In the case of older sister Beyonce, the connection with that history of black pop was implicit, at least until Beyonce starred in Dream Girls.  Now, on Solange’s new album, Solangel and the Hadley Street Dreams (2008) it’s much more fully on display.  In promo photos for the album, Solange looks like a young, more exotic Diana Ross:

Solange Knowles

And the press surrounding it often notes this relationship to classic black pop, such as a review in the Boston Globe:

This is such a smartly executed, classy set of songs that’s miles away from the hoochie pop being turned out by young female R&B vocalists these days.

(Of course, that above review is equally problematic, in that it once again irritatingly associates black women with “hoochies.”)

Or this one, noting that Solange is using the album to recover a negative public image:

Steeping an album in classic Motown and other R&B sounds of the late ’60s and early ’70s may not be the wildest maneuver in 2008, but throughout Sol-Angel, there is a kind of frolicsome adventurousness that is singular and undeniable, even when Solange lets loose with the sourness and addresses her false public image.

Her video for “Sandcastle Disco” especially draws on the Motown connection, but also on the current soul revival.  It presents her in front of a white band of dudes (who look a lot like The Jam, especially the blond guy with the Weller haircut; come to think of it, this video looks a lot like several of The Jam’s videos), with two black, female backup singers.  Despite the fact that most soul groups were integrated–both Motown and F.A.M.E. studios in Muscle Shoals had black and white players–the current revival features mostly white, male instrumentalists.

While I do think that it’s a little weird that her backing band in the video is all white and Justin Timberlake’s touring band is all black, I think that Solange has something different going on than a Svengali such as Mark Ronson pulling the strings. She already did that with her schizophrenic first album.

Instead, she seems to be capitalizing on and blending the history of black pop music, from Motown to disco to latter-day R&B in ways that smartly reposition it for a bigger audience–one that includes not just hip, white college kids playing the obscurity game but also audiences who listen only to the Top 40 and who listen primarily to “urban” stations.  It may not be as faithful a recreation of soul as the Dap Kings, but it instead fuses past (Lamont Dozier!) and present (Boards of Canada! Cee-Lo Green!) forms of pop music into something sparkly, fun, and of the moment.

Of course, there are bigger questions here about class, race, and musical audience.  But for right now, I’m just going to take off the academic hat and listen to a good pop song.  Which “Sandcastle Disco” is.

*Strangely absent from these discussions:  Gnarls Barkley.

Rock History, What I Leave Out: Disco

Disco deserves a second chance.

The music is much maligned, for reasons that have as much to do with its audiences–gay men, folks of color, women, working class, John Travolta–as much as it has to do with the music itself.   Yes, some of it reeks like a camembert on a hot summer’s day.  “A Fifth of Beethoven,” which I always play in my music history classes as an example of a fascination with high culture gone horrifyingly awry (What did you just do to the Fate motive????), comes to mind in that category.

But, despite the misgivings that I have about disco, the genre offers some pretty compelling reasons musically, culturally, and historically for its inclusion in my class.  In a reverse of what I usually do with this column–since I know someone will read it and say, “Of course you don’t teach disco!  It sucks!” I’m going to go with those first, and then address why I don’t teach it.

Disco undoubtedly descends from the rock & roll tree, just as surely as punk or heavy metal, each of which I do teach (and more of the former of those in just a second).  One could easily plot out one line from soul to funk to disco.  And, hell, just listening to the growing prominence and function of the bass line–first based on an R&B bass line, then doing a repetitive thing, then adding syncopation to the repetitive thing, then doing a repetitive thing with octave ornamentation and syncopation–should be convincing enough to say that dismissing disco as simple or bad or soulless is at the very least a little off.

Most of the musical criticism of disco revolves around the production: it is not “real” music; it is manufactured.  But if you look at and actually listen to a band such as Chic, you can hear that the band is a real band in every sense of the word.  Nile Rodgers incorporates a distinct, easily identified rhythmic pattern into his guitar part; Bernard Edwards plays a melodic, syncopated, completely inspired bass line.

After listening to Chic’s “Good Times,” you probably recognize it from several contexts, up to and including samples in Grandmaster Flash’s “Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel”; Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight;” imitation in Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and Blondie’s “Rapture”; and distillations of Edwards’ bass line in most early Duran Duran songs (of course, they were produced by Nile Rodgers).

And then there are the drums of disco, all high-hatty and crunchy, that are oh-so-tasty.  Here’s Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”:

And, finally, there are some FANTASTIC vocal performances in disco.  Donna Summer?  What would the world be without “Love to Love You?” or “I Feel Love”?   A whole lot darker and less sensual, that’s what.  And what about Labelle?  Here’s some “Lady Marmalade” for you (also–listen to that hi-hat!  And check out those costumes!):

But these are not the things that most people talk about when they complain that disco sucks.  No, people think of the really awful disco songs, such as the ouvre of the falsetto-favoring Bee Gees, or the highly produced Village People.  So my question is, why is disco remembered for its shittiest, and not for its best?

Back in the heyday of disco, aka the late 1970s, the music was favored by certain audiences mentioned above, who do not and did not fit the mold of “what rock critics like.”  Reebee Garofalo, a pop music scholar, has argued that disco’s audiences brought out the worst in some people.  Homophobia, for example, almost certainly played a part in the dismissal of disco as “real music;” racism played another; and then there’s sexism, since almost all the vocal performers of disco were black women.

When I think about the big “disco sucks rally” in Chicago, I think of Nazi book burnings.  So does Nile Rodgers. At that rally, on July 12, 1979, people destroyed more than 10,000 disco records.  There’s something completely disturbing about hating something so much that you can’t just turn off the radio, but have to actively, literally blow it up in center field.  It’s not just about the music at that point.

I have no shortage of what I could say about disco, particularly as a gender and sexualities scholar.  And I think that disco influenced hip-hop, new wave, and even the recent resurgence of post-post-punk/dance-punk bands that flourished in the early 2000s.  So why do I leave it out?

I mostly leave disco out because I have other battles to fight, and I try to include a balance of “things the kids will like” with “things the kids really ought to know before leaving this class.”  In the beginning, it’s all about getting them to understand things like the Great Migration’s effects on everything from Chicago blues to Motown.  At the point in the semester where disco arrives, I usually have a big wave of resistance from the majority when I expose them to punk.  While you’d think that they would be open to it, I’ve yet to have a class that embraced punk rock.  Or even shook hands with it, on the whole.  So, putting disco into the mix at that time would be a fine dance indeed.  Perhaps even the “Last Dance.”  And I’m pretty sure I would not feel love.

That’s Dr. Bad Cover Version to You, Buddy!

Yes, it’s official.  I’m Dr. Elizabeth K. Keenan.

That’s all.  I spent two hours fielding questions about my dissertation, so I am pretty sure I have nothing smart or entertaining or funny or interesting to say for the rest of the day.  Back tomorrow, though, with Rock History, What I Leave Out: Disco!

Review: Anton Corbijn’s Ouvre

Anton Corbijn became famous as a photographer, but it led to his work in music videos, which, in turn, led to his feature-film directorial debut, Control (2007).  I was going to review that film, but it seemed a little late, given that it’s been out on DVD for a bit now and it was in theatres when Agent M and I went on our first date (it is now known as the movie we did not see on our first date).

Still, reviewing anything of Corbijn’s ultimately comes down to a few style characteristics that run throughout his work.  And so, I present to you a review that can be applied to the majority of his works:

In Corbin’s cover photos for band/book of photography/music video for exciting, new band/music video for boring, old band/new film, he has once again reinforced his visual style through supersaturated color/grainy black and white.  In his images, we gain an impression of his subject as moody and serious, but, as ever, Corbijn provides contrast to these grave, even gloomy portrayals with sexy women/an incongruous affair with a sexy woman, juxtaposed with a dowdy wife/a nonsensical plotline involving farm animals/hooded figures who look like Jawa Klansmen/photos of Dava Gahan that highlight his package.

As a gender and sexualities scholar, I can’t help but notice the use of women as naked objects/absence of women in favor of farm animals/absence of women in favor of old men in diapers/facile contrast between Ian Curtis’s dowdy wife Deborah and his mistress Annik Honore/sexy women who would clearly be out of the band’s league, unless they noticed how Corbijn has highlighted Dave Gahan’s package.

The use of naked women/an old man in diapers/a lead singer in king’s mantle and crown/really poor plot pacing sets off the lack of a plot, but Corbijn is essentially a photographer.  Photographs stand still in time, giving only the suggestion of action; unless they are photojournalism, they do not force explanation.  And the lack of a plot is not nearly so problematic as in a music video/feature film.  In a music video, a narrative is not necessary, but appreciated/in a feature film, narrative provides a driving force, especially if one is attempting to portray another artist’s life.

================================================================

You can try this review technique yourself, inserting any band or series of videos you like.  The only time it does not work is Corbijn’s series of self-portraits, which have lots of issues in their own right.

This brings us to the conclusion of Anton Corbijn week!  I may not post again until Tuesday, when this week’s “Rock History, What I Leave Out” will feature disco, an entire genre of music!

Anton Corbijn and the Curse of Death

I tell you what: if I ever get famous, I’m not letting Anton Corbijn take my photos.  Or direct my videos.

In 1994, when I was a senior in high school, I singled out photographer and music video director Anton Corbijn as a marker of bad luck for bands.  At the time, Corbijn was best known for his work with Depeche Mode.  Also at that time, Depeche Mode lead singer Dave Gahan was battling a heroin addiction and had become painfully thin, as evidenced in the 1991 video for “Halo,” where Dave’s appearance as the “Strongest Man in the World” was pitifully ironic.  It only got worse when he did their videos for 1993’s Songs of Faith and Devotion. Dave Gahan looked bad.  And he hadn’t before Anton Corbijn had begun taking pictures of the band with great regularity.*

Thus, armed with stacks of Rolling Stone, Melody Maker, and NME, and thoroughly addicted to watching 120 Minutes, I began to notice something.  Most of the bands that I liked (and quite a few that I didn’t) had encountered Anton Corbijn, and they were all doing poorly.

At the time, most of my evidence against the photographer consisted of hyperbolous declarations of how he made people suck, especially REM and U2, who were–in my opinion–at their height of lameness in the early 1990s.  Then, things started happening that indicated that the Curst of Anton Corbijn was a little eerier that that.  As in, members were dying, finances were going down the drain, and bands started to suck.**

So, here’s the list of bands I had back then, updated a bit:

Joy Division, by Anton Corbijn

1. Joy Division.  If you watched Corbijn’s Control, the biopic of Ian Curtis, on DVD, you might have watched the interview with the director in the extras section.  Notably, Corbijn talks about his photos of the group.  Before Corbijn takes a photo: band is on the ascent.  After: Ian Curtis dies.

2. REM.  The band was awesome in the 1980s, right?  Who doesn’t like “Radio Free Europe”?  Who does like Automatic for the People?  Before Anton Corbijn: Awesome American band that was political but not always preachy.  After: Bill Berry has aneurysm on the 1994 tour for Monster; Michael Stipe becomes overwhelmed by hubris.

3. Echo & the Bunnymen.  The English band was perhaps the first indicator of the Anton Corbijn Curse of Death.  The band released some completely awesome and weird albums in the early 1980s, chief among them Ocean Rain. Corbijn direct the videos for “Seven Seas,” “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo,” “The Game,” and “Lips Like Sugar”–all, except “Seven Seas,” post-Ocean Rain.  The band broke up in 1988, and their drummer Pete DeFrietas died in a motorcycle accident the next year.  Before:  Weirdest and best use of a symphony orchestra by a post-punk band.  After: Band breaks up; drummer dies.

Anton Corbijn's take on U2

4. U2.  Oh, U2.  Anton Corbijn’s photographs for The Joshua Tree (1987) are perhaps the most well known and iconic photos of the band.  And surely his photographs of them did not really hurt the band, did it?  Especially considering how great an album The Joshua Tree is, and how it gave the band their biggest hits, and how it’s one of their “masterpieces.”  But was Bono’s weirdness all that evident beforehand?  No, he was primarily known for being socially conscious and for pulling that girl out of the audience at Live Aid and dancing with her.  After: Sunglasses galore.  Giant, malfunctioning mechanical lemons, descending from the heavens.

5. Nirvana.  Now, this is really one of those things where the universe was making fun of me.  I put the “Anton Corbijn is a curse” column in the March 1994 issue of my zine.  I write, “Thus far, Corbijn’s curse has not really affected Nirvana that much.  But who can tell what the future holds?”  I think we all know what the future held.  (I swear, if I did, I would not have written another item in that issue of the zine, which was “The Top Ten Reasons Why Nirvana Should Be Taken Out Back and Shot.”  I blamed myself for Kurt Cobain’s death for years.)  Before:  Successful and promising band, albeit one with a singer with serious problems.  After: Death of a really talented fellow.

Since noting this blog entry would appear, I’ve had a lot of people noting that Corbijn’s involvement with other bands has brought them bad luck, or at least made them suck.  One of these is Metallica.  Another is the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  If anyone else has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

In addition, Corbijn has directed videos for Naomi Campbell (????) and Bryan Adams (“Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman,” no less!).  While I’m pretty sure that Naomi Campbell should stick to modelling, and that Bryan Adams always sucked, I thought it was worth noting that Anton Corbijn does not seem to work with strict artistic principles.

*I even have a photo book, somewhere, called Strangers, that includes ONLY Corbijn’s photos of Depeche Mode.  Yes, I was a hardcore fan.  Do not mock me.

**Of course, this entry is tongue in cheek.  I don’t really think that Anton Corbijn is a curse.  However: you’ve got to admit that Corbijn’s own website is a little strange.  His self-portrait section consists entirely of him portraying dead celebrities.

Rock History, What I Leave Out: Queen

Queen is just too diverse musically to talk about in a rock class.

OK, I know that sounds wrong, and that it sounds like I’m saying that rock music in general is not musically diverse.  That is not what I mean at all.  And still, you’d think this wouldn’t be too hard to get around.  After all, I teach other musically diverse bands, such as the Beatles, in addition to those who continually mine the same territory *cough*Rolling Stones*cough*.

I also know that one could counter with a standard, “But you teach a classical music class, too!  How do you deal with being too diverse musically there?”  The answer is: I often don’t face that problem, since the class–again, a survey–frequently focuses on one person or one example to represent entire style periods and ends up, by necessity, being even more reductive about musical style and eras than my rock class.   But that’s beside the point.  We’re talking about Queen here.

Freddie Mercury was a terrific frontman, with the courage to wear sparkly unitards and total moustache-leatherman getups in front of audiences who would probably have been less comfortable meeting a gay man in real life.  He could work an audience, they say.  Also, did you know he was Indian?  And Brian May is close to my heart, if just for the fact that he finally got his PhD in astrophysics some 30 years after having begun his dissertation.

Queen has also sold an ungodly amount of records, influenced countless bands in countless genres, and provided the soundtrack for the single best scene involving Wayne and Garth and their friends.  And talking about Queen could provide a template for understanding the meaning of “camp,” which the band illustrates better in its music and Mercury’s visual style and onstage/audience interaction and so on and so forth.  And lord knows college students often need a healthy introduction to camp.  For that alone, they are entirely worthy of including in the history of rock and roll.

But finding that core topic around which one focuses a class is difficult with Queen.  With the Beatles, our above musically diverse example, we can trace the development of rock and roll, not as something necessarily linear, but at least logical and timely: from their beginnings as a “guitar band” with tight vocal harmonies to a band influenced by psychedelia to a band drifting apart, their story fits a standard and understandable narrative of the 1960s.  It may not be in the totally “true” story of the Beatles, but it enables students to get a larger picture of how popular music developed along with major historical events.

Queen’s musical diversity, on the other hand, is more about bricolage, or the piling up of many different musical styles, often within the same song.  Think about “Bohemian Rhapsody,” that signature song.  It’s got operatic choruses, rock riffs, extended piano sections… and I want to analyze it all at a level that will leave students glaring at me for having ruined a perfectly decent song, since it will take the entire hour and a half to get through it.

Most of Queen’s music is that way.  It’s interesting because it doesn’t fit a standard narrative, but that also makes it harder to explain to a group of students whose only knowledge of the band is, at best, some exposure to Queen being performed at sporting events.  And it’s also more difficult for them, since most of them have very little understanding of musical concepts, to understand high-level musical discussions.  This is a freshman level class, after all.

I would like to teach them, though, in order to find the right tone to introduce the interesting musical aspects of Queen and to reconcile them with the other issue above, camp.  While there’s a lot of Velveeta involved in Queen’s music, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m being a jerk and saying that’s all there is, and teaching them would allow me to explore that knife’s edge of teaching.

At any rate, I will leave you with something completely cheesy and in the spirit of camp: Anton Corbijn as Freddie Mercury:

P.S.  It’s Anton Corbijn week at Bad Cover Version!  Tomorrow’s exciting post will feature a thorough examination of why I think he’s bad luck for the bands he’s photographed.

Bad Cover Version’s Bad Cover Versions: Coldplay’s “Cover” of Depeche Mode’s Video

It was almost immediately after last week’s intro to Bad Cover Version’s Bad Cover Versions that I completely randomly asked myself, “What are Depeche Mode doing these days?”  So, I toddled over to their website, where I saw that … wait… what?

Coldplay has done a “cover” of Depeche Mode’s video for “Enjoy the Silence.”  You know, the one where Dave Gahan wears a big, long, furry king’s mantle and crown, and walks about the countryside looking windswept and pretentious?  It’s supposed to be one of their videos that is “artsy,” directed by Anton Corbijn (who has photographed a lot of people, but perhaps none so iconically as Depeche Mode and U2).

Coldplay’s video is for “Viva La Vida,” one of their many songs suggestive of putting U2 in a blender with an orchestra and adding a little bit of the spirit–though not sound–of Dave Matthews.  They’re just slimy enough that you know Chris Martin is doing it not because he believes Coldplay are good, but because he knows that they will appeal to an audience that is relatively underserved but has lots of cash: those upwardly mobile, middle-class kids who have yet to develop real taste but know that taste exists, and so they play it safe with milquetoast music.

Copying Depeche Mode’s video–or, more precisely, Anton Corbijn’s visual style–is a move from the same dance.  Anton Corbijn’s photography is at once accessible and artistic, often featuring extraordinarily well known bands in very remote places.  And, as we all know, landscapes are “artistic.”

His series of videos for Depeche Mode were oftentimes a little bit weird in plot, but by no means visually assaulting.  Often filmed in grainy black and white, or alternately in bright, bleeding, oversaturated color, his videos for Depeche Mode often featured the band interacting with very sexy women (e.g. “Personal Jesus”).

In “Enjoy the Silence,” though, Corbijn made lead singer Dave Gahan the visual focus against the Swiss Alps, with shots of the whole band posing seductively randomly thrown in (Oh, and there were shots of that omnipresent Violator rose, too).  Supposedly, the video’s storyline alludes to The Little Prince.  But mostly it’s just a guy dressed as a king, walking around with a deck chair, who, according to Corbijn, was a man with everything in the world and just wanted a place to sit.

All of which brings me to Coldplay’s video.  The title and lyrics of the song “Viva La Vida” lend themselves easily to the kingly theme.  But, wait a minute: one thing that made the Depeche Mode video at least a little interesting was that it was completely random.  Dave Gahan is a king, wandering around with a deck chair?  OK, that’s kind of fun.  But with Coldplay, we have things spelled out for us, because we’re stupid and middlebrow and not that clever (or so Chris Martin thinks of us).

Also, Coldplay’s video puts the king in the city, looking lonely, and in town models, looking large, instead of in the windswept mountains.  Oh, and instead of carrying a chair, he’s got a painting.  Lacking the interest of “What the hell is he doing out in the Swiss Alps with a lawn chair?”, the video is pretty lame.  Also, if I were Corbijn, I’d also be up in arms about how poorly edited the whole thing is in comparison to the original.  Corbijn, though, actually directed the video, making it somehow a bit of an in-joke that I just don’t get.

Anyway, here’s the Coldplay version:

And Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”:

NOTE: “ROCK HISTORY, WHAT I LEAVE OUT” RETURNS TOMORROW!  I just ran into a bit of a deadline here today in my real life.