{"id":597,"date":"2017-11-28T05:15:57","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T05:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/?p=597"},"modified":"2017-11-28T05:15:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T05:15:57","slug":"fell-in-love-with-a-stupid-ridiculous-painstakingly-difficult-and-time-consuming-medium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/assignments\/music-video-review\/fell-in-love-with-a-stupid-ridiculous-painstakingly-difficult-and-time-consuming-medium\/","title":{"rendered":"Fell in Love with a Stupid, Ridiculous, Painstakingly Difficult and Time-Consuming Medium"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Unless you&#8217;ve been inhabiting the space under a rock for the last half-century or so, you&#8217;re probably familiar with a certain wildly successful Dutch company known as Lego. Lego has captured the imaginations of millions of children (and adults) worldwide with their system of stackable colored bricks, offering endless possibilities for creation and even more endless opportunities for toe-stubbing. If you actually are unfamiliar with Legos, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lego.com\/en-us\">their website<\/a> might give you some idea as to what I&#8217;m talking about. In any case, you can understand the ubiquity of this toy, its iconic status in popular culture. This status makes it all the more impressive that an artist could take this toy and use it in ways not previously conceived of, could re-appropriate it for artistic purposes in a totally novel way.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The White Stripes - Fell In Love With A Girl (Official Music Video)\" width=\"525\" height=\"295\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fTH71AAxXmM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>At first view, one might be tempted to believe that the &#8220;Fell in Love with a Girl&#8221; video is the product of some kind of pixelation filter applied to an otherwise-normal music video. However, in a style similar to claymation (a la <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?time_continue=7&amp;v=T0qagA4_eVQ\">Wallace and Gromit<\/a>\u00a0created by Nick Park &#8211; watch this video if you&#8217;re unfamiliar, it is well worth your time) the video was in fact created frame-by-frame with real Lego sets, shown in rapid montage to give the illusion of movement. Why this artistically bold-yet-inherently childish style for the video? The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metrolyrics.com\/fell-in-love-with-a-girl-lyrics-the-white-stripes.html\">lyrics<\/a> to the song suggest a kind of paradoxical struggle between love and lust, with the narrator trying (and failing) to distinguish between the two. Perhaps this duality is meant to be expressed by the silly-yet-complex Lego animation. Perhaps the depiction of people with small plastic bricks is meant to convey the humanizing force of love versus the more animal force of lust. Indeed, the people depicted in the video (often Jack and Meg White) are often stark white &#8211; is this a sign of ghastliness or purity?<a href=\"http:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/jack-white.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-636 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/jack-white-300x187.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"261\" height=\"163\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/jack-white-300x187.jpg 300w, https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/jack-white.jpg 599w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 261px) 100vw, 261px\" \/><\/a>\u00a0(It should be noted that they are rather pale in real life as well, though&#8230;) Or perhaps, and in all\u00a0 honesty this is where I would put my money, this song was chosen for the Lego video because it is incredibly short.<\/p>\n<p>The collective hive-mind of YouTube users tends to agree with this assessment. TheAndrewj96 writes: &#8220;THIS SONG IS TOO DAMN SHORT. You can&#8217;t put this much kickass in a song and just make it less than two minutes in length. I mean, this should be at least three minutes long.&#8221; Andrew J raises an interesting point about artistic compromise here &#8211; is it okay for an artist to limit their output due to a labor-intensive medium? Andrew isn&#8217;t forthcoming about whether or not he has ever constructed an elaborate stop-motion Lego video synchronized to music, but in case he has, he makes a valid point. The song is relatively short, for better or worse.<\/p>\n<p>Other viewers seem less perturbed by the song&#8217;s length, instead focusing on its status as something of an anthem within its genre. Nugie simply writes &#8220;Timeless punk jam.&#8221; This seems to say it all, in three simple words nailing down the White Stripes&#8217; origins in punk as well as their rise to iconic status over the last 20 years, thanks in large part to bold and recognizable songs like this one. For some interesting accounts on how the band (Jack White in particular) developed this sound, check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitestripes.net\/articles-show.php?id=14\">this<\/a> series of brief interviews with some of the band&#8217;s early associates and friends.<\/p>\n<p>However popular the band has become, though, there is evidently some question about their place in history, as evidenced by comments like this one, from Memedkemal Aksoy roughly one year ago: &#8220;The white stripes was a legend in the 2000&#8217;s&#8221; While on the surface this appears to be a compliment to the band, it can be read as a thinly-veiled jab at the importance of the White Stripes&#8217; music. Were they really only at this legendary status for one decade? Has the musical culture that once welcomed them since forgotten about innovations like &#8220;Fell in Love with a Girl&#8221;? In fact, often the White Stripes are excluded from discussions of their own genre, as in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thoughtco.com\/timeline-of-punk-music-history-2803347\">this<\/a> article detailing the shape of punk music over the last half-century.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, the White Stripes have only made their way <a href=\"https:\/\/www.billboard.com\/music\/the-white-stripes\">into the limelight<\/a> of popular music a handful of times in their existence. But does this prove the assertions of nonbelievers like Memedkemal Aksoy? Or do legends come from beyond the realm of popularity, ascending by their art alone?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unless you&#8217;ve been inhabiting the space under a rock for the last half-century or so, you&#8217;re probably familiar with a certain wildly successful Dutch company known as Lego. Lego has captured the imaginations of millions of children (and adults) worldwide with their system of stackable colored bricks, offering endless possibilities for creation and even more &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/assignments\/music-video-review\/fell-in-love-with-a-stupid-ridiculous-painstakingly-difficult-and-time-consuming-medium\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Fell in Love with a Stupid, Ridiculous, Painstakingly Difficult and Time-Consuming Medium&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[307,309,308,6,271,306],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-video-review","tag-jack-white","tag-lego","tag-meg-white","tag-music","tag-music-video","tag-white-stripes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":637,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}