Unicorns and Ke$ha
Chris Marrs Piliero is the innovative and creative director that won an award a couple months ago for his direction of a great video for The Black Keys called “Tighten Up”. Now, Piliero has been always a strong promoter of things that are awesome and sometimes ironically ridiculous on his blog marrsattacks.com (which is now has been changed to imgonnablogalloveryourface.com) marrsattacks.com is a type of music video portal for his work. What is interesting is that his lust for critically eye-opening imagery and laser-beam-focused humorous symbolism, quite literally penetrates the hearts of Unicorns and the viewers of Ke$ha’s latest music video alike.
What I like most about the video for “Blow” is that it matches perfectly with the lyrics and pacing of the song. Ke$ha is very confrontational and aggressive in the lyrics for the song. Let’s face it, she’s telling people to drink her Kool Aid. And most of us know this may be a pretty serious reference to that athletic shoe group that sacrificed their lives for their faith. So it is quite fitting that Piliero used Unicorns at a party to portray a 4 minute story of mythological proportion.
Wikipedia says that this song is about hitting the clubs…maybe. But this track seems to be more about conflict between titans than anything else. I would have thought that without the video, but seeing Unicorns in suits and dresses, drinking champagne only confirmed this suspicion. Notice that it doesn’t seem that the Unicorns are the primary targets for the conflict. They appear to be destroyed in a form of collateral damage, that leaves them spilling forth rainbow waves instead of blood. This was especially enthralling because I recently purchased Highlander 2: The Quickening (unfortunately DVD version…I wish my VCR was up and running). And in Highlander films the destroyed powerful beings eject a tremendous amount of energy when they die. Although, Ke$ha didn’t hover in the air when they died, while absorbing the power, maybe that was because she was using a gun instead of a sword? More on that later.
Chris Marrs Piliero sealed the day with how he had, Van Der Beek pronounce “appreciate” in the middle of the song. That was my 2nd favorite part in the whole thing.
One creative directing technique I noticed was that Piliero chose at 3 minutes and 32 seconds to have the champagne glass shatter and explode when it was hit by the laser gun. This was impressive because my first assumption was going to be that since the weapons were firing lasers (made out of light), the energy would pass through the champagne glass in a translucently diffused fashion and boil the alcoholic beverage into gas. It is decisions like this one that really makes Blow stand out among modern music videos in a class of its own.
Big thanks to vevo for allowing websites to embed this great video “Blow” by Ke$ha:
-Tyler
Read a Possible explanation for the Origins of Unicorns – CLICK HERE