When it comes to bizarre, visceral images, I think music videos have everything else beat by a mile. Especially in the last 10 years or so when the internet has made everything a little bit stranger, music videos have taken the lead in getting weirder and weirder.
So today on Music Video Relapse we're watching one of the craziest effects in a music video that has seeped into my nightmares, Keith Schofield's video for "Big Bad Wolf" (2011) by Duck Sauce. Let's take a look.
This video centers around the people having human heads for genitals. There's no getting around that. Not tiny human heads, but full sized human heads right there, in between their legs. The heads are so big that the dudes have to wear modified pants to fit them in.
Also, when they dudes see some lady stuff they like, the heads start howling.
Our two main characters work at a shoe store and a restuarant. They are going about their daily business but they keep seeing sexy things which makes their genital heads start howling, which alerts the ladies they are staring at. It's a tough go for these guys so far, and even tougher for any women they have to be around.
Fast forward to the night time, and these dudes go out to a club where they are almost immediately spotted by two women (Joy Nah and Heather Marie Zagone) who are interested in them. Then the guys do what every person usually does at a club, pulls down their pants so they can wave their genital head around. Pretty soon a bunch of random guys are dancing around them, and one of the ladies confirms our worst nightmare: the women also have heads where their gentials should be. The two dudes and two ladies go back to their respective places for weird, gential head sex.
One of the great things about this video is that the two genital heads are played by the two members of Duck Sauce: A-Trak and Armand Van Helden. Duck Sauce seem like two guys who are down for a lot of things, but I have to imagine the pitch that the artists will appear in a music video between two guy's legs is a tough one to make.
Schofield makes sure to take advantage of the central gag by including lots of "head as genitals" jokes. We start out with the basics (urinating via the mouth of the head), and we eventually get more advanced (one of the lady genital heads shoots a ping pong ball of her mouth) until we have one of the heads spitting out a milky white substance. There even seems to be some sort of logic in what features of the head translate to real life genitals. So, there's that.
The behind the scenes video for this is pretty amazing. It literally does not show anything getting made, but instead features intereviews with the participants in the video where they seem genuinely shaken at what they are doing:
(Except for Armand - he's definitely down for the whole thing.)
Even though I'm sure there is some behind the scenes info somewhere, I'm going to guess based on the stances of the actors at different points in the video that the genital head actors are actually there with their heads between these nude people's legs. If I'm correct, it sounds like a fun shoot.
In a world where it's pretty hard to shock people, this video managed to do it and have a sense of humor about it. Although I will never get the image of 4 dudes with their pants down dancing with heads as genitals, I'm still glad this video exists.
