After my post last week about Mia’s controversial video slaughter of ginger innocents, I thought it might be worth showing a video which I find a lot more shocking, by a band I’ve recently come to love. The band is Xiu Xiu (which is apparently Japanese for ‘There, There’), and the video is for their recent song ‘Dear God, I hate Myself.’ I’m just going to put one picture of it up here, and then a link. You can decide if you want to watch the whole thing.
And here’s the video in full, if you still have an appetite for it, so to speak.
There you are. How you feeling? Hungry?
This isn’t people getting blown up, or shot in the face, but to me it’s more hardcore, more explicit, than that MIA one. This might be because I’ve had a girlfriend who was bulimic, and I never really liked to think about those moments after meals when she locked herself away. My own personal baggage aside, there’s something absolutely car-crash mesmerising about this anyway.
This is someone actually making themselves sick for the sake of art. It’s unsettling, strange, and feels a little wrong. Just to watch it puts you on edge. That’s the point of it, of course, and I think that for this band, that’s what they want. I also think that the performer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist band member Angela Seo, is being very brave doing something like this. She’s not spoken much about her reasons for doing it, but she she’s made it very clear on the band’s blog that she was in complete control of what she was doing, though of course some have called this exploitative.
I find it mesmerising- it matches the music, which with its combination of haunting, pained vocals, catchy melodies and aggressive, unpleasant casio-keyboard bleeps, is a wonderful piece of unpop- a tuneful self-mangling which makes me love them all the more.