Lou Reed - Modern Dance

Some things are better to enjoy in a modified form. For example, without sound or color or simply a soundtrack or vice versa or heavily distorted or from another room or while the refrigerator is humming and the washing machine is drumming and the kettle is whistling and the teeth are rattling. You get the point.

Such is the case with the music video for Lou Reed's song Modern Dance.

I already covered the other Lou Reed music video on this blog and now Youtube recommended me this video, so why not have another about the great one?

Modern Dance is a song from Lou Reed 2000' album titled "Ecstasy". The song itself is a contemplation about going places in a manner of a modern dance composition. Which doesn't say much because modern dance is a mystery and its function in the lyrics is to defamiliarize narrative with an arbitrary detail that sticks out. Over the course of the song, the protagonist mentions options like going to Amsterdam and spending evenings at the Van Gogh Museum. Or Yucatan, "where women are women, a man's a man". Or just falling in love because that's a fine option too.

The video for the song is closely tied to the lyrics and yet it is something completely different. On the surface, it is on the nose mockery of the blatant performance art, but the more you look at it - the more earnest stupid fun it seems. There is no undercurrent - it is just what it is and it is really weird to realize that there is nothing to it except for what is on the screen.

And what is on the screen. There is one and only Lou Reed in a chicken costume, standing in the middle of the stage while two showgirls are doing the job. Lou just stands and stands and endures whatever girls are doing to him. The girls are doing basic walkaround routines. Their costumes adapt to the national symbols of the countries mentioned in the lyrics. So you get a tartan suit, french beret, a sombrero and so on. At the same time, the girls are slowly but surely tear the costume apart, throwing feather away.

In the middle of the video - Lou's chicken suit is cleared off the feather and he sits around like a bag of nutshells. Then we cut to girls preparing the soup - throwing mock vegetables in and mixing the thing with the giant spoon. Then the narrative fragments into the glimpses of tearing the feathers, Lou sitting around, Lou being boiled in the soup, Lou dancing with the girls, being boiled in the soup, being torn apart, dancing, boiled, dancing. Then the song ends, he takes of the chicken head and walks away.

When you watch this with the sound on - it is just there. It doesn't do much because you are focused o the song. But if you turn the sound off - things change. You start to piece together a narrative. The video starts looking like one of those old vaudeville documentations that capture the routine but none of its context. It feels odd, misplaced and incomprehensive.

You see the man in the chicken suit. And he looks really passive. Sometimes he lips a phrase to punctuate the narrative, but for the most part, he is just there. The girls are walking around in, changing costumes all the time, then they start to tear the chicken costume apart because they want to make a soup out of this chicken. The man is still passive and so he ends up in the pot and girls continue to dance because that's what they do.