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[NOTE: I started the 125 Music Videos Project late last year through posts in Facebook, which is singularly unsuited to this sort of thing. I am therefore, after a hiatus, taking it to the good folks of LiveJournal; if this is your first time viewing one of these, you can find a description of the project, as well as the 12 entries from #125 to #114, at the Music Video 125 Tumblr. Thank you.]
Rank: 113
Title: Toe Jam
Artist: The BPA featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal
Director: Keith Schofield
Year: 2008
Censorship is a peculiar concept, if you think about it. Banning a work of art is pretty cut and dried: this work is dangerous, so you people don't get to see it. But censoring without banning outright, especially in cases of bleeping, blurring, and the like, means calling glaring attention to the thing you're trying to shield the audience from, and most of the time not even disguising what it is that's being hidden. Given that, it's not surprising that artists, writers, filmmakers, etc. have used the tropes of censorship for their own purposes. There are countless examples going back decades and even centuries. If we insist on staying on the music videos topic, the blocked-out man nipples in the clip for R.E.M.'s "Pop Song '89" springs to mind; more recent videos have toyed with treating abstract bits of censorship as physical objects, like Beck pulling a pixel blur off his head like a helmet at the beginning of "Loser." But the video for "Toe Jam" by BPA (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim) featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal takes the idea somewhere else entirely by making censorship sit up and do tricks. The set-up, such as it is, involves a gaggle of fun-loving folks gathering in a wood-paneled basement and getting naked. Once the naughty bits come out, they're immediately covered up by huge, blatant black bars wherever (and only wherever) they're needed to shield our eyes. It's not long after that we discover director Keith Schofield's one bit of inspiration, which was to notice that black censorship bars are basically typographical objects, and when you have typographical objects, you can make pictures. And make pictures they do—by bending at the right angles in groups, they draw arrows, hearts, a smiley-face (they flip the bird to generate little circles for the eyes), and spell out the song's title. Better yet, by alternatively exposing and covering their relevant bits with their hands, they make bars appear and disappear, which makes for some clever bits of animation and Busby Berkeley splendor. It's a one-joke clip, but the joke is a silly one, and it's fun to discover each new twist on the concept. There's even an extra subversion level in how the nudity is presented: because it's crammed with naked people and shot in a room decorated in 70's porn chic and a grubby Instamatic color palette, the expectation is for raunchiness, but there's a prevailing innocence to the whole thing, with lots of smiling, uninhibited dancing, and a general attitude of, "Whee! Being naked is fun!" Even the one sly giant-penis gag is more goofy than tawdry. I can't stand censorship, but I must admit that this is one video where seeing the naughty bits wouldn't be half as good.
Rank: 113
Title: Toe Jam
Artist: The BPA featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal
Director: Keith Schofield
Year: 2008
The BPA featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal "Toe Jam" from Keith Schofield on Vimeo.
Censorship is a peculiar concept, if you think about it. Banning a work of art is pretty cut and dried: this work is dangerous, so you people don't get to see it. But censoring without banning outright, especially in cases of bleeping, blurring, and the like, means calling glaring attention to the thing you're trying to shield the audience from, and most of the time not even disguising what it is that's being hidden. Given that, it's not surprising that artists, writers, filmmakers, etc. have used the tropes of censorship for their own purposes. There are countless examples going back decades and even centuries. If we insist on staying on the music videos topic, the blocked-out man nipples in the clip for R.E.M.'s "Pop Song '89" springs to mind; more recent videos have toyed with treating abstract bits of censorship as physical objects, like Beck pulling a pixel blur off his head like a helmet at the beginning of "Loser." But the video for "Toe Jam" by BPA (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim) featuring David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal takes the idea somewhere else entirely by making censorship sit up and do tricks. The set-up, such as it is, involves a gaggle of fun-loving folks gathering in a wood-paneled basement and getting naked. Once the naughty bits come out, they're immediately covered up by huge, blatant black bars wherever (and only wherever) they're needed to shield our eyes. It's not long after that we discover director Keith Schofield's one bit of inspiration, which was to notice that black censorship bars are basically typographical objects, and when you have typographical objects, you can make pictures. And make pictures they do—by bending at the right angles in groups, they draw arrows, hearts, a smiley-face (they flip the bird to generate little circles for the eyes), and spell out the song's title. Better yet, by alternatively exposing and covering their relevant bits with their hands, they make bars appear and disappear, which makes for some clever bits of animation and Busby Berkeley splendor. It's a one-joke clip, but the joke is a silly one, and it's fun to discover each new twist on the concept. There's even an extra subversion level in how the nudity is presented: because it's crammed with naked people and shot in a room decorated in 70's porn chic and a grubby Instamatic color palette, the expectation is for raunchiness, but there's a prevailing innocence to the whole thing, with lots of smiling, uninhibited dancing, and a general attitude of, "Whee! Being naked is fun!" Even the one sly giant-penis gag is more goofy than tawdry. I can't stand censorship, but I must admit that this is one video where seeing the naughty bits wouldn't be half as good.
