Flack wrote:What a calculated mess. Take a girl that looks like Paris Hilton, dress her up like Avril Lavigne, pair her up with a guy a'la the White Stripes ... ugh, it's just a bunch of ideas that don't work together.
After getting the concert scene out of my system, one aspect of the experience I learned to intentionally look for in live music and videos, are the state of the band's shoes: are they clean and new? Dirty and abused? Usually the ones wearing well worn, nearly thrift store quality shirts, pants, and sneakers are the ones that contain a soul or some energy that resonates and I can feel... Its the difference between seeing a vocalist sip a beer onstage while still infusing their performance with that sort of primal energy, and seeing another sip Red Bull while the logo floats in the background, plastered over their instruments.
Lets vaguely use the above ideas to analyze this video: every single piece of clothing on the camera hungry leads, looks brand new. The shoes are unsoiled, the clothes carefully coordinated without a wrinkle, looking vaguely awkward on the female lead as they bounce around absent the formed nature a human body wears into their day to attire. Its almost awkward, but leads into a shallow, erm, shallowness - their carefully assembled clothing is meant, much as the manufactured genre of their video, to appeal and draw in some demographic that is just as manufactured as they are.
Trendy, edgy / counter culture clothing and make up? Check
Integration of various "hip" themes? Check
Flat lense to emphasize how fabulous the lead looks? Check
Vaguely foreign element to feel exotic? Check
Adequate camera time to emphasize leads? Check
This isn't even touching on their music: the lyrics are general to a fault, kicking over and stomping on the pseudo punk scene, catering to the supposed emo "hard living" kids who relate to vaguely parsed messages of social alienation...
"Live by tricks when you don’t have a thing
Live like a hippie if you wanna be king
People say it’s not worth the wait
Everybody loves somebody to hate"
Its not even that original as Avril Lavigne and to an extent, Katy Perry saturated the market for appealing to a demographic that wants to view social unrest and rebellion as a hip thing they can be part of, while it is actually carefully labeled, quantified, and kept at a distance. "I kissed a girl" resonates with this same idea, of normalizing "radical" feelings or ideas while carefully labeling, and thus separating them from the listener: they can relate to her and so they can this "feeling," but they don't have to accept or encounter it.
The Ting Tings are trying to capitalize on this established market, taking such ideas and inclinations to a far shallower level where their perfectly auto tuned voices (which completely removes the British accents of either of the singers in the process) offer an overly scrubbed presentation of an already sanitized idea.
"Break it, make it, you can make the break
Back and ..., just make it great
Intake, don’t fake, don’t wanna let go
Make all the changes that you need to make
Stand back, give it up, ain’t life a b--ch"
The drummer's lines continue to emphasize this point, carefully relating non-controversial yet considered "edgy" ideas to the listener. His message is clear: change your life without thinking of others, its cool, but if you don't need to don't and accept that life is a "bitch" because that is okay too. Its at a point where the original singers and writers who couldn't relate to their audience with feeling except through a few predefined symbolic ideas, have had their work lifted and the symbols have now been placed completely out of context, hence the clothes, lyrics and oh, the music...
Much like the used clothing and shoes denote someone at least a genuine regard for themselves, some honest accent in a piece of music gives a "human" characteristic to the sound, to the rhythm and beat. Every spoken word of the Ting Ting's is devoid of any of, dare I have to categorize them, human characteristics. The strongest leaning of any of the singers, is when the drummer puts in his two cents and then were left with an overly modulated, mechanically rippled effect to his harmonics. All of this adds to the Ting Ting's having no energy, no primal fuel or cock eyed inclination to their presentation or music that scares or mystifies the listener, much less inspires them to sing along.
The band feels as if their soul has been cut out, the wounds cauterized, with the procedure following a carefully lead protocol for "how things are done." The soul has been removed and the end result, are elements of a performance that have no room for reality, for dirty shoes or well worn clothes, and instead covers itself in the now twice scrubbed, new and clean to begin with, attire of its "target demographic." No performer nonchalantly sipping a Bud, looking down at his hands in concentration, then standing and scaring the audience with his intensity. This band sips their carefully selected, endorsed beverage with its logo plastered over all of their gear, and believes they are genuine without questioning why. Which is at the end of the day, more frightening than anything else...