Admittedly, female characters don’t seem to star too often in music videos for male artists. If they do, they tend to be in the object rather than subject position (think Tawny Kitaen’s work in Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and “Is This Love?”). But today I came across two new music videos that seemed worth mentioning, as they feature female protagonists.
Both clips involve young women attempting to overcome an obstacle. One is attempting to destroy a statue. The other is taking on a series of opponents in a tennis match, one of whom is herself. One is an animated clip. The other is live action and appears to be indebted to a vague notion of Pan Asian culture perhaps most closely aligned with Martin Roberts’s read on Japanese cult media’s appeal to “cool” American and European audiences. One has an unsettlingly open ending. The other is problematic in its pairing of a white female with a tall black woman, a Samurai, rapper Lil Jon, and RZA from Wu-Tang Clan (who served as the aural authority on ”blackness” and “Asianness” as a composer for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series). One clip supports an instrumental hip hop artist. The other one promotes one of indie rock’s most contested bands of late. Both involve the colors red, black, and white, but only one of them has Joe Jonas and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Deru
“Peanut Butter and Patience”
Say Goodbye to Useless
Directed by Howie Shia
Vampire Weekend
“Giving Up the Gun”
Contra
Directed by the Malloys
