Happy labor day everyone. We would be on the couching watching "Summer Eleven" on Netflix, but seeing as the crew here at IMVDb basically have fake jobs we made up, we figured we might as well be doing those fake jobs.
Speaking of doing things, did you guys ever watch music videos on iTunes? Meaning, before they started charging for them? This is around 2003/2004, when you used to be able to go and just watch music videos on iTunes for some reason. I watched a lot of them, and I fondly remember a few of them like "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" by Jet and "Let's Get It Started" by Black Eyed Peas. This is several years before YouTube and Vimeo existed, so this was a pretty awesome deal - a bunch of music videos online all in one place.
The video that I remember watching more than any of them, though, was "I Believe In a Thing Called Love" (2003) by The Darkness, directed by Alex Smith. Let's check it out.
When they arrived on the scene in 2003, The Darkness were marketed as a sort of Queen-esque throwback 70s band complete with the long hair, a skinny lead singer with a great falsetto, and a healthy dose of theatricality. They presented themselves as sort of modern Spinal Tap that played real songs. Their first album, Permission To Land, even came complete with a cover that was styled to look like it came from the 1970s.
This video - their first big music video for an international audience - reflects their throwback image in a big way. It takes place on a space ship that comes complete with a rotating round bed and a bathtub, which Justin Hawkins is taking a bath in when the music video opens. He gets out and is dried off by a giant purple thing. The rest of the video is them performing in and around the spaceship, capped off by a battle with a giant sqace squid.
There definitely seems to be an element of "we have to make fun of ourselves to make this okay" in this whole video, and going over the top is always tempered by a kind of wink saying "we know this is ridiculous". For example, before the big Marshall amp stack solo, Justin Hawkins is inexplicably holding a giant jimmy dean sausage and using it as a microphone. It'd be different if The Darkness were playing rock that sounded like the same stuff coming out at the time by other bands and also making some jokes in their videos, but the Darkness come off as a parody of something very specific in this video.
The elements of the video are at times a parody of material from another era as well. The space ship, the giant crab monster - all of that is referencing/parodying science fiction movies and TV from the 60s and 70s. Music videos do this a lot, but what makes this video different from a genre parody like "Sabotage" is that the music is also a kind of reference and parody as well. The music and the visuals are linked in a way that most music video references and parodies aren't.
Complexities aside, this video is a lot of fun and has some fun little moments. I like the drum set moving forwards as it comes out of the door, and the great shot of the whole band on their space ship deck. You can't watch this for free on iTunes anymore, but you can buy it and ... watch it? I don't know, I don't know why iTunes sells music videos, but there you go.
