Iggy Pops Up On The Radar
He teams with Underworld on Bells and Circles
Like a concoction of a cerebral Christopher Nolan film, the stream of numbers and letters from the hacking scene of The Matrix, and an epileptic worst nightmare, the music video for American icon Iggy Pop and British electronic duo Underworld’s new song “Bells & Circles” dares you to make sense of their madness.
While the song may be titled “Bells and Circles”, you could just as easily convince us that the name was “Smoking On the Airplane” from the number of times this phrase is repeated throughout the video. In terms of visuals, the video blends together a dizzying display of words transposed against short clips of Iggy Pop and Underworld members Karl Hyde and Rick Smith moving to the trance-like beat.
What is the message they’re trying to send in this video you might ask? At first glance, it is not abundantly clear. However, after several minutes of being fixed within their trance nightclub mindset, you start to piece together the idea that the song is meant, at least partially, as a ballad for someone searching longingly for the days of yore.
In particular, the artists seem to be yearning for a time in which a simple vice like smoking in public is not attacked as a reprehensible action. This is not to say that this longing for a cigarette break on an airplane is all that these guys strive for. Rather, the act of smoking on an airplane could represent any action that was once commonplace but is now scrutinized and looked down upon by a society that they might feel is quicker to jump on the actions of others than reflect on the minor vices they have done.
While the video certainly gave us a bit of a headache, the message that runs throughout is one that pleads its audience to just relax and not take every little mistake or misstep as the end of the world. Although we can see where they’re coming from, there is still something to be said about the collective negative effect that things that seem minor in isolation can have on the world.
Whether it be smoking on an airplane, not recycling your plastic bottle, saying something insensitive, or any number of small iniquities, on the individual level they might not seem like much. But if you expand this to the collective human race, that’s when you start to see your airplanes fill up with smoke, your oceans fill with litter, and your politicians fill up with shit.
