Bees Love Truth

(I guess these are links I think are slightly too interesting to delicious? I don't know.)

I don't actually like any of the little outfits herein, but as fashion-world performance art, man. Super fun. I do just enjoy replacing heads, though.

The other day I was coming home from work, and WERS was having its acapella segment. It was not that exciting (except that I now know what 'Jolene' is about), but there was a version of 'Such Great Heights,' done by a couple of equivalently wispy-voiced girls. I'd never heard all the lyrics before, whether from unwillingness to sit through the whole song or from difficulty in understanding whatsisname; but now I have, and now I know that there's a hole in the lyrics large enough to drive an mean-spirited video interpretation through. (You may not want to read this if you're one of those people who both likes this song and can have associations ruin things for them.)

Okay, so at the beginning, the protagonist is being self-consciously sappy about his (presumably) girlfriend, who's away on some trip. He's saying things about how he misses her and he wants her to come home. In fact the whole song is only about missing someone, not about how actually being with them is (and this is fuel for the popularity fire in certain circles. It's easy to idealize someone who's not actually present; all the iconic love-stuff can be projected onto them in their absence). This is important because once the chorus arrives, the point of view is shifted ('They will see us waving [...etc]'). Imagining a video for this song, it's not unreasonable to picture at this point a low angle shot of some people in grey suits and ties shading their eyes against the bright sky and motioning the inexplicably flying emo avatars to return to earth.
(Having this shot from the perspective of the singer doesn't work all that well, because the 'come down' gesture would be hard to read and the consternation of the 'they' would be invisible. Also I'd argue that thinking of the singer and his chick as unattainably far away, if only emotionally, is exactly what the songwriter wanted. They'll never understand us! Man!)

So, okay, in some small way, our perspective is placed with the earthbound normal people, the ones not in love or whatever. By wanting to place his awareness both with the observers and the observed, Mr. songwriter has made it fair game to apply 'everything looks perfect from far away' from both viewpoints. It's supposed to be applied from the viewpoint of the fliers, who are above the troubled world and don't have to care about it because they are reenacting a scene from Superman. However, the people on the ground can also think this about the fliers. How good is their relationship? I, the listener, don't actually know, all I hear is someone pining away for someone who is absent. There is no information on whether when they're together they're actually happy, or whether their relationship only looks perfect from far away.

And this is how I'd play it. I'd do a nice straightforward live-action video with cutely halfassed effects (to indicate the low production values necessary for those in love (ha, no, seriously to red-herring away from the actual intent of the video to subvert the ostensible message)), but whenever there was a shot of the couple flying around hand in hand, I'd make sure they were at arm's length and never quite looked at each other. Ooh, better yet, only looked at each other at arm's length. Maybe a couple of unexplained tear-stained faces. Just a couple of other little telltales that indicated that they weren't really actually comfortable around one another, that the relationship that they thought they had when they were apart wasn't anything like the one that seemed to be there when they got together. I'm sure it could get pretty sinister, but I think playing it subtle would be the way to go.

Unpleasant will instantly be able to spot why I like this band. At least, I like the singer.

Frivolity aside, if they'd cut down on the generally large amount of background accompaniment and go more the Tom Waits route, I would be pretty grateful.
[Edit] Oh, they did, it's just that it took them until this year's album to do so. Well, good! (For clarity, dude doesn't hardly ever sound anything like Tom Waits. I just hope I'll find some more songs where he does.)