Gentlemen, I am outraged.

Your gross negligence in assuming I am ashamed of any of my musical predilections is noted, and will be revenged. There is absolutely no reason to assume, self-righteous pricks that you are, that the carmine creeping up my collar is anything other than stoic pride, a touch of the ol’ toxoplasma gondii, and perhaps a brief spike in my everyday, baseline feelings of discomfort.

Listen you, I was enjoying the Ruski pop nymphets way back, before any hoity-toity English remixes got loose, much less actual American album releases. This shit was edgy and inaccessible. Hell, it still is! I would get home from my live-action Vampire the Masquerade roleplaying session at the local college campus (back when I was a ginger-curled nymphet myself), maybe boot up a game of Fallout 2, invite my BFF Steve over, and we’d watch these videos, on repeat, in silent awe. Why, I thought to myself, did I not have a dark pixie of a partner, an eternal semi-succubus, someone to cling to during the long nights of crippling self-doubt, someone to share my pants and lipgloss, someone to hold my hair while I purged, someone with whom to ghost ride the whip? I mean, someone besides Steve?

Now, emerald-haired, naked in a wooden trunk, chugging Red Bull and typing on a keyboard for which I cannot see the screen, I ask myself: if I had found her, this dark unicorn, would things have turned out better?

But then I think: how could they?

See, this is how you do it.

I’d just like to point out, that they totally “ghost ride the whip” as it were, way before any one invented the phrase, or made it into something to do in rap videos. Just goes to show that Californians haven’t had an idea that didn’t come from SOMEWHERE in Asia, since 1998.

Comment by Adam Cybulski — July 18, 2007 @ 4:15 pm

Noise du Jour: “Nas Ne Dogonjat” by t.A.T.u. [ectomo]

I generally like my music videos a little more high-concept, preferably with a plot, but for t.A.T.u. I will make exception. They are the grimy Soviet candyfloss of the Europop genre, their sticky musical confections studded with trifling angst and grand themes: puppy lust, thwarted yearning, and lost innocence.

In this video: dubiously lesbian nymphets grand-theft-auto a tanker truck and ghost ride the whip at 90mph down a blighted Russian highway, as their girlhoods flash before their eyes, and are finally run under the tires. Having murdered their old selves, our freshfaced heroines career into a snowblind future, adorably frostbitten, and clutching each other through their bulky parkas.

Adjudged NWS, for brief child nudity (RUSSIA!!!).