Placebo – “Running Up That Hill” (VIDEO)
From the limited-edition, 2-disc release of Sleeping With Ghosts (11/18/03) and the rerelease of Meds (1/23/07)
Rock / Alternative / Glam
Stream it on MySpace
British alt-glam-rock band Placebo premiered the new video for their cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” on May 15, featuring a video collage of footage submitted by fans. It followed a 20-day program in which the band and their label partnered with Motionbox.com, which offered a free download of the song and collected thousands of submissions within the first week.
While the song has been out for years now, I’ll start by saying that it’s a fantastic cover. The band took an art-rock staple and spun it into an even more melancholy offering with more of a focus on the music itself, replacing a New Wave beat with a dark, pulsating backdrop. It’s a depressing f*cking song but it’s just bee’s knees.
That said, the video consists of hundreds of clips of various shoegazers, goths, hipsters and a lone preschooler mouthing the lyrics of the song. The result ends up falling somewhere in-between an artsy college film and an artsy music video from the ’80s (see, e.g., Depeche Mode, “Never Let Me Down Again”), with a YouTube-camera-phone-video undertone. It’s that undertone that ends up holding this video back. While I find it feasible that most of Placebo’s fans (save for the girl on the beach, the girl with the crazy hair and the aforementioned preschooler) could be found at the local goth bar, I find it offensive that there’s no guy in a wheelchair. If this is supposed to be a comprehensive collection of Placebo fans, are we really to believe that people in wheelchairs don’t like Placebo? Or maybe it’s that people in wheelchairs are too lazy to send in videos of themselves. Are you calling people in wheelchairs lazy, Placebo?
But seriously, folks, while it’s understood that this was supposed to have a blog-like fanfare feel to it, They should have cut out the lo-rez stuff and stuck with the sharper, black-and-white footage. Even the stuff that’s slightly out of focus is okay, but the pixelated stuff comes off as pretty rough. It would have come off a whole lot smoother and much darker as is dictated by the tone of the song. The footage that works absolutely soars, though it’s unfortunately marred by the few camera-phone-type images. With some more editing, I’d gladly throw in another machine gun.
Rating:
