Here’s a remix of a cover song. Self Control was recorded by Italian singer-songwriter Raf, in 1984. Laura Branigan covered it the same year, on her album titled Self Control. Both versions were very popular in Europe.
The words of the song tell a story of someone feeling powerful feelings that there’s more to life than this, which make them want to go out at night looking for it. That could just be young people being excited by the local night life, going out to mingle with people, make friends, and find romance. Laura’s version of the video turns that into a story of herself as the protagonist finding her way into an underground artistic movement, where she meets artists whose search to make sense of their powerful feelings leads them to create surrealistic art.
Now, 37 years later, here’s a remix of Laura’s cover of Raf’s song, by an Italian DJ, starring kids of what are probably their grandchildrens’ generation. The video is a modernization of both versions of the song. People who feel strong feelings that they’re more to life than this go out at night– and now during the day too– looking to mingle and make friends, and they’ve created their own art forms in the process. That’s what rave culture is.
Why did all the people in the video make the clothing choices they did? And why did the creator of the video make the choices to include all these clips? There’s a debate there that’s been going on in the art world for as long as I can remember. Is this video click bait for men? Is it a new generation of young women pushing against the boundaries of acceptable behavior for women? Is it both?
That isn’t America in the video. That’s Italy. Italy, in the warm, sunny Mediterranean Sea, where everyone on the peninsula lives within a 2 hour drive from the beach. Italy, which is famous for its pre-Christian history, where everyone today knows they have a cultural history that wasn’t controlled by the Catholic Church. Italy, which inherited its artistic traditions from ancient Greece, and later produced the Italian Renaissance, where nude art was seen as a tribute to the gods, or god, who created the human body. Italy, where people are generally healthier than they are in America, because they eat better and get more exercise. Even here in America, when physically healthy people get together for a rave on a summer afternoon, it looks a lot like this.
The big problem I have with this video is the ending. It doesn’t build up to any kind of climax. It just fizzles out. For the first 3 minutes it tells a story of a lot of different people dancing to the same song, as if they all feel the same way about the theme of the song. Then suddenly there’s a couple women washing a car, and shots of individual women dancing by themselves. To me it feels like the creators of the video just gave up on the story 30 seconds before the end of the song and threw together whatever video footage they had lying around.
On many different levels, when young people work together to create something new, with all the technology that’s available to them, it turns into something their grandparents’ generation never thought of. Even if it’s their own interpretation of one of their grandparents’ songs.
