In a note related to the previous post on Whitacre almost solely by the fact that I like both performers, I looked at a Ben Folds music video (mostly because choral pieces don't really do the whole music video thing). I chose Folds' "Rockin' the Suburbs" because I know a bit about the backstory that makes the song funnier. As it turns out, that story also makes the video funnier. Essentially, Folds wrote the song in mockery of the group Korn, who once called him out in a magazine (that's what I remember from the story Folds told at a concert five or six years ago).
In "Suburbs," Folds mocks gratuitous swearing, shouting, and all the other aspects of Korn he finds annoying. In the video, he does essentially the same thing to the genre. He uses strange video effects, like doubling images, overlaying videos, and so on. In some shots, his voice doesn't match up with the video, and in others he is seen playing an instrument (on this album, he actually did play all the parts and combined them) in similar fashion, almost like the hilariously bad Journey video for "Separate Ways" (though, in fairness, my parents have watched it and see nothing funny about it).
But I think Folds's antics in this video align perfectly with the tenor of the song and his counter-culture appeal. He doesn't really look like a typical rock star, nor does his music sound typical. But his lyrics aren't bound to senseless rhyme schemes, and the words he chooses are poetic and meaningful - and often laced with irony. I am biased toward him already, so I would purchase his music after seeing this video. But he has traded on word-of-mouth more than overt advertising in the past, and this video seems to travel well in that vein.
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