Sure, music videos can be lofty artistic statements, but sometimes music videos are the perfect vehicle for some awesomely dumb stuff. Today we're watching one of my favorite dumb-but-hilarious music videos, "Sharks" (2012) by LA Font, directed by Hank Friedmann.
The first thing you'll notice is this video takes place in and around a McDonalds. The second thing you'll notice is that all the McDonalds logos have been replaced with a logo for LA Font that sort of looks like the McDonalds logo. A lot of things happen in this video, most of them fast food related.
One of the things I enjoy about this video is the fact that the members of LA Font never come close to so much as a smirk (except for maybe the bass player). They are all really focused thoughout the entire thing, and I think it would've ruined the video had it turned into a bunch of young guys terrorizing a McDonald's with a knowing wink. Nobody wants that.
This fact makes for some fun moments, like when the lead singer uncerimonisouly pops out of a McDonalds PlaylPlace slide and starts his guitar solo. Like most of this video, it's so weirdly dispassionate that it adds a whole other element. It's the same situation with the four band members walking in a line down the drive through road.
There's also the sort of run and gun feel of the video. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that McDonald's was probably not totally on board with having some band filming around their place of business, so you have to imagine that at some point LA Font waited for a lull in drive thu traffic and then rushed over to scream "it goes towards the moon!" into the drive tru order taker thing. I enjoy that thought.
Some narrative can be found in this video as well: there's a fight within the band and the as a result their drummer is executed by having hamburgers thrown at him. Actually, if you follow the logical path of this video, this video is about fast food establishment obstensibly named after a band that wanders its grounds and also seems to hate its food.
The ending ties everything up nicely by implying that the band is hit by a car the looks like a hamburger, because if you're going to go, getting hit by a hamburger car is a dignified way to die.
