It’s no secret that drug use is a part of the music world, and on more than one occasion made it’s way into songs and music videos. Sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it becomes the thing you’re known for for most of your career. But in the case for the new clip from Christchurch band Nakey Oh Yeah, Fuck Yeah, it just makes things take a turn for the weird and strangely wonderful.
Nakey gets weird for Oh Yeah, Fuck Yeah. Boxing kangaroos, sexy sandwiches and dramatic subtitles make for a fun and surprisingly thoughtful clip.
Fair warning before you do watch the clip, don’t try to make sense of what transpires. It’s as if Lewis Carroll himself wrote the script. Perhaps you need to be altered to truly understand what transpires, but some of us work in the day time and don’t have the luxury of getting wasted to watch a music video. The video for Oh Yeah, Fuck Yeah essentially plays out like the best of soap operas. It’s over dramatic, over acted and makes no god damned sense when you try to put the events in a logical context. It’s pretty bloody good.
Following the adventures of our slacker hero, we’re treated to a scene of your typical slacker den. Mismatched furniture and used crockery a strewn about the place, as is a vacuum that ironically has clearly not been used. He becomes absorbed in his Street Fighter style game, emotionally invested in his kangaroo boxer’s epic fight to the death. I don’t want to spoil the rest but there is plenty of heartbreak, sandwich lust, bizarre body language and yellow subtitles like the kind SBS uses for foreign films. A clever addition, if anything the viewers at home need some sort of device to translate what is going down. On paper it sounds batshit insane, perhaps it is, but it works.
If you had to discern a meaning from this video it would have to be one of mundanity. Yes there are shenanigans afoot, but they’re conceived from a place to escape the churning gears of the ordinary and monotonous. The very notion of video games is to experience a fantastic world that is not possible in reality. It’s a realm to revel in glories, triumphs, and even heartbreaks that are just not tangible anywhere else. Sure that’s where the clip starts, but it brings these notions into ‘reality’ with the over the top dialogue and nonsensical plot.
Any old band can mug for the camera and play their instruments, but it takes a special one to realise a concept like this and pull it off in an understated way. More or less, it’s just a damn fine clip, one that’ll no doubt have you quoting the song title before it comes to a close.
