‘Ode to THE Bouncer’ Liberates Pop Culture
Is “Ode to the Bouncer,” Studio Killers’ debut single and music video, so liberating because it’s so entertaining, or vice versa? All good pop temporarily relieves us of the need to be respectable, but Pop Art also removes the obligation to be frivolous by freeing our wits and mimetic impulses. The music-makers of the British production outfit Studio Killers identify themselves only as animated personae—Dyna Mink, Goldie Foxx and female lead singer Cherry—and their pure comic imagination shows up the routine of mainstream pop’s frivolity.
Images from “Ode to the Bouncer” video by the Studio Killers
The song gives us Cherry’s in-the-queue attempt to make an impassive (never heard) bouncer “lift up the velvet rope.” She starts out flirtatious and cajoling (“I’ve got friends inside/ It’s my birthday tonight”), but quickly gets openly desperate, then aggressive: “Bouncer, empowered and aroused/ I see it in your trousers/ And in the way you browse ’er.” Her helplessness, her feminine lack of threat, gives her license to rail at unfair authority in hilarious terms that compel the listener’s recognition and identification (including a priceless Pink Floyd reference). The irresistible refrain, with its bombastic synths and pulsing bassline, complicates the identification: “I just got to dance right now/ It’s critical.” Dancing to this chorus, we exercise a privilege Cherry (a literal outsider) doesn’t have, even as we realize that her need for release is basic to humanity.
Stills from the “Ode to the Bouncer” music video: entertaining and liberating.
“Ode to the Bouncer” reminds me of the great Pet Shop Boys B-sides, “Sexy Northerner” (2002) and “The Boy Who Couldn’t Keep His Clothes On” (1997). In these two tracks, singer Neil Tennant close-reads the behavior of individual clubland outsiders in order to tease out a sense of nightlife’s social complexities (race, class, regional tribalism), just as Cherry exposes gender hierarchy within her party microcosm. Tennant’s ironic-yet-riveted vocals express a concerted effort to see beyond the sexy, fancy distractions of dance culture into something even more fascinating.
The “Ode to the Bouncer” music video (again credited to Studio Killers) also aims to depict dance culture differently by casting it in an animated, videogame-like milieu. Disembodied, hand-drawn body fragments—bare midriffs and muscular, flexing arms—populate the video’s dance floor. Cherry, by contrast, is rendered as a curvaceous CGI avatar with knee-high boots and mascara-dripping eyes. Her contours recall the smoothness and sheen of real flesh. To gain admittance to dance-floor paradise, Cherry must physically defeat the towering, death’s-head bouncer.
The bizarre fun of this video is also what makes it expressive of current pop-culture crises. (The video’s deliberate robotic look harkens to the anime-anonymity of Jamie Hewlett’s Clint Eastwood for Gorillaz.) The ambiguous nature of Cherry and the bouncer’s grappling (he places a big black hand on her butt as she straddles and pummels him) at first resemble Jeff Koons’ inflatables but especially the blithe sex-and-death mashups in Lady Gaga’s music videos. The image of Cherry lounging next to the prone bouncer in what could be either a post-coital or a post-beatdown tableau might well be a direct parody/homage to the ending of the “Bad Romance” music video. But “Ode to the Bouncer” ends with Cherry entering the club through the window to the ladies’ room and dancing with Dyna Mink and Goldie Foxx. Studio Killers take their fun more seriously than they take themselves, so they instinctively avoid any of that fashionable death-fixated “darkness.”
Early on in the video, Cherry is shown applying her makeup, dipping her fingers into thick pink goo and slathering it across her lips. This acrylic-like substance reappears in different colors and contexts throughout the clip; at one audacious moment it descends in a torrent to drench Cherry. Within Studio Killers’ scheme, it seems to represent the primordial stuff of creativity, the need to express oneself that brings together nightclub revelers and pop-culture creators. “Ode to the Bouncer” provides visual and aural validation of that need. Because it’s critical.
