Solo videos go viral
Too often, music videos exist solely to maximize a performer’s impact on consumer culture, a branding exercise. But there’s a small subgenre of solo dance performance videos—typified by the recent viral hits “Lonely Boy” and “Call Your Girlfriend”—that inverts consumerist logic, expressing instead the impact of popular culture upon the individual within “normal” society.
This subgenre can be traced back to director Spike Jonze’s groundbreaking, millennial Fatboy Slim clips “Praise You” and “Weapon of Choice,” wherein Jonze (and his muse Christopher Walken) wittily combined youth culture anarchy and popcult grace. Jonze, in turn, may have drawn inspiration from Denis Lavant’s unforgettable solo dance at the end of Claire Denis’ film Beau Travail (1999).
Against the house track “Rhythm of the Night,” Lavant depicted in wild, scary choreography the suffering of a repressed man succumbing to his inner demons. Switching in an instant from ramrod military posture to fully horizontal prostration, he described his character’s torment as a kind of crucifixion. Though related to tragic plot events adapted from Melville’s Billy Budd, Lavant’s dance—a suicide note communicated in movement—conveyed the ironic triumph of deviance over normality.
At a much lower level of physical articulation, we have The Black Keys’ “Lonely Boy,” in which actor Derrick T. Tuggle performs a quasi-parodic dance routine in unadorned office space. Tuggle’s palsied renditions of the twist and various disco moves complement the banal, derivative song. He quite literally goes through the motions specified by the uninspired lyrics, looking at his watch as the singer complains about a girl who keeps him waiting, etc.
It’s unclear whether the joke is on The Black Keys or on the viewer, but Tuggle’s spirited literalism certainly appealed to fanboy culture’s love of “faithful” remakes and rehashes, with 7 million YouTube views and counting.
Back in December, Robyn’s video “Call Your Girlfriend” inspired its own viral remake in connection with the singer’s Saturday Night Live appearance. SNL writer Taran Killam’s workplace re-enactment of Robyn’s solo dance coup was a rare embarrassment-free moment for the show. Neither withering satire nor fawning celebrity tribute, Killam’s disco moment was an amusing testament to the original video’s infectious sense of drama.
Set on a soundstage without scenery (as bare as the hallway in “Lonely Boy”), “Call Your Girlfriend” serves as a clarion call to imaginative projection. Seemingly in one take, Robyn—an untrained dancer—struts, slides and somersaults through director Max Vitali’s widescreen frame. The expansive image puts Robyn’s solo dance in perspective. What’s most important here is not the performer’s individual talent or ego but the emotions she works to evoke, which are bigger than she is. And when the soundstage lighting shifts dramatically, suddenly conjuring a dance club, Robyn and Vitali capture how feelings set free by pop culture transform our perceptions, thus transfiguring the everyday world.
These one-person flash mobs flaunt the incongruity of amateur dance in quotidian space. They confront an apparently uncaring society with flamboyant spectacles of deviant feeling, perhaps none more effectively than last year’s “Überlin,” the R.E.M. video directed by Sam Taylor-Wood. Solo performer Aaron Johnson’s dance through the streets of London keeps swerving around masculine norms. When imitating a Banksy-like squirrel graffito or cartwheeling on the pavement, he’s closer to Lavant (yes, him again) in the “Modern Love” sequence of Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986).
Suspended in air like a trapeze artist, with a streetlamp wedged between his legs, Johnson offers iconoclasm that translates as sexy heroism. That’s a triumph worthy of Lavant and Jonze.
