Sunday, November 7, 2010

Willow Smith Is Pretty Much the J. Geils Band

So after I saw that Britney Spears had tweeted how she thought that Willow Smith was so cute, I -- oh wait a minute, back up. OK, so Willow Smith is the daughter of Will and Jada-Pinkett Smith (who is spelling what right here? I don't know. Or care.) Right OK, so Willow has that song "Whip My Hair." In case you're wondering what the lyrics are, I took a picture of the lyrics of a random spot in the song, you know, just to fill you in. You know, to get you up to speed.



You get the idea.

So OK,  Britney Spears had tweeted:



OK, so I went and watched the video, because I was interested because of Britney, but then also I had read some kind of other headline somewhere that was all like, "Britney Whips Her Hair" which is weird, I was like "Are they trying to say Britney Spears made an exasperated gesture?"...So that explained her Tweet. OK, so anyway, I'm watching the video and is this girl singing about whipping her hair and being pretty much just, bein' sassy, and I think I might even have heard her say "swagger" in it somewhere. Does she have a swagger coach? I need a swagger coach. I think Justin Bieber has a swagger coach. Or how about a swagger couch? I can sit on this couch and just sort of swagger while I sit... OK! But! So! Anyway!

The first thing I thought about was that the video for "Whip My Hair" was interesting because it had this classical dystopian feel of there being no color used, just black and white clothing and furniture, etc. Here's a picture of part of it:



You know, like all like Brave New Classroom or something. But then the minute the singing starts, there's rebellious dancing and singing with kids' hair splaying paint around and like, you know, the singer of this song is our savior etc. etc. etc. And then it's like how in Pleasantville there was the whole thing about a society/world all black and white, and then color starts to creep in, and that affects the world, symbolism symbolism and so on. And that feels weird to me too because of how loaded the word "color" or "colored" is in terms of skin tone, race, etc. ANYWAY, so the real point I'm getting to here is a point that is unrelated to any of this discussion about any of these bigger issues. My point is that the video for "Whip My Hair" is pretty much the  same as the video for "Freeze Frame" by J. Geils Band.

OK, so here's "Whip My Hair" by Willow Smith:




"Freeze Frame" by J. Geils Band










A regular Jackson Pollack fest around these parts.

Might I also add that the comments people put after things on You Tube are hilarious, sometimes better than the videos themselves? When is someone going to do a book of just those? In two minutes, and it will be me. My favorite quote for the "Freeze Frame" video someone left was this:


I remember,back in 1993 I used to work in Fitchburg,Ma pumping gas after school. The bass player would come by all the time.I used to get all funny feeling, I asked him "you played bass for the J Geils band huh?" He said yeah. I don't think he knew how much I thought of him and the band.


Awesome.

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