Victims of the Orlando nightclub attack unite with a message on their bodies as a canvas, John Prine digs into the fishing-time Americana vaults, a tone-deaf Brazilian pop crew hypnotize the masses with a beautifully confounding kaladiescopic twerk, more, in the 28th week of the year’s Best Lyric Vids.
A Song for Orlando — ‘Hands‘
One of the uglier sides of these modern terrorism times is the quickening pace at which we move on to the next grieving process of another tragedy, forgetting about the previous. The charity song has long been a tool to fight that, even before the web. Commissioned by GLAAD and Interscope, with proceeds headed toward the Equality Florida Pulse Victims Fund, the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida, and GLAAD itself, ‘Hands’ finds a perfect medium in the lyric video to honor the 49 victims killed in last month’s Orlando nightclub attack, utilizing the body as a canvas for change, while Mary J. Blige, Jennifer Lopez, Selena Gomez, Gwen Stefani and myriad other stars round out choir:
Justice — ’Safe and Sound’
The other Daft Punk with teeth, french duo Justice open a door on a five-year silence with a new electric light floor banger that erupts into all things funk on the backend. Typical grainy, Justice four-on-the-floor magic with aggressive string tracks and a haunting, anthemic vocal carrying things along, this one cryptically referencing some sort of drag race or night ride, but the best thing about the lyric video treatment is the one verse strobed in the beginning, never to be repeated again, overlaid over their cross emblem like a hymn book in church:
John Prine — ‘Fish and Whistle’
Dug up from the archives, circa ’78 and Bruised Orange, the country-blues vet bottles rural America in a good old-fashioned summer fishin’ metaphor, laced charmingly with old men baiting hooks, foggy rivers and fields for days that, along with a simple white text overlay, feels like one of those Pure Michigan or Montana state ads in the best way possible:
Jamie Lidell — ‘Walk Right Back’
Only thing wrong with this return to neo-soul form from Nashville’s favorite British expat is the absence of his illustrious gold-sequined coat he’s been known to light up a room with. Otherwise, not much to talk about here — simple does it best sometimes, with a tri-color (black/white/red) background palate serving a block-letter narrative about the lure of retracing the early stages of love:
Romagaga – ‘Kiu’
We may be missing the mark entirely here, perhaps not in on the Brazilian joke — Romagaga apparently started as a viral video comedy crew — but at surface value, this hypnotizing piece of tone-deaf garbage will grow on you, promise. Something about that kaleidoscopic twerk and a verse about wanting something but it being complicated. God bless the internet:
