Drive-By Truckers and Aloe Blacc get political, Ariana Grande gets her Whitney Houston a cappella vocal range on, the OG country super(lady)group, Trio, dig up some old ‘wildflowers’, and more, in the 31st week of the year’s Best Lyric Vids.
Drive-By Truckers – ‘What it Means’
Though it was written a couple years ago during Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin’s deaths, as Patterson Hood mentions in this bittersweet song, contentious cases that question our country’s declining morality so frustratingly “happened last weekend, and it will happen again next week.” There have been a few angry tracks that run the catharsis gamut on these subjects, but DBT take it subtle and folk, to let some of this ugly shit sink in, with organ fills and a bright prairie rolling melody, while a desaturated flag and the dialogue take perfect centerstage:
Katy Perry – ‘Rise’
Most likely not an official lyric video treatment from everybody’s favorite forgotten ‘teenage dreamer’, but it’s Olympic opening ceremony day and consider this our subversive attempt at plugging USA A-OK to the tune of an awful paint-by-numbers dramatic pop nugget:
Trio – ‘Wildflowers’
Country’s OG super(lady)group, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstandt dropped “Wildflowers” back in 1987 — a classic wild-mountain lovelorn banjo-plucker just dripping in harmonies and field-ready fiddle fills. For this update for a forthcoming box-set, we get some buttered up bass tones and a stronger backbeat, complete with a kaleidoscopic flower-studded video straight out of some long distant future version of one of those old 70s country shows discovering a computer for the first time:
Ariana Grande – ‘Into You’
Say what you will about Grande, but this a capella rendition of the Dangerous Woman cut has teeth. Likewise with the decision to blast the foreground with massive lyrics in focus, and Grande soft-blurred in the background nailing the vocal range that made her famous. The narrative — another story. But the way of design, bound around a song about some of love’s intoxications, thumbs up:
Aloe Blacc – ‘Broke’
Cut with stats like “the richest 20% of U.S. households own 89% of the wealth” and montages of everything from #BlackLivesMatter rallies to Make Donald Drumpf Again spewing the garbage he’s so good at spewing, the mostly buttery soul of Blacc shows some froth here, in making a political statement about racial and class divides. Like the Drive-By Truckers number, the message does a fine job of not getting lost in the medium:
