THE MUSIC VIDEO FOR “WAKE ME UP”

“Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc was one of my favorite songs from last summer. Let’s end this crazy charade that it was from some Swedish meatball named Avicii. It’s got more Aloe in it than Aveeno hand cream. I recently stumbled upon the music video and, I got to tell you, that noise was dumber than Ray Rice popping by The View. 

http://youtu.be/IcrbM1l_BoI

Don’t get it scrambled, I give music videos a long leash. The weirder the better. For my money there’s nothing better than firing up a salad and getting lost in Die Antwoord’s entire collection. See I Fink U Freeky, Baby’s On Fire and Fatty Boom Boom for a nice starter course. And yes, scrambled is the new twisted.

But back to the lecture at hand. Allow me to give you a little recap of the video. It opens up on half a second of a vineyard shot, then boom, a shot of a rundown shack apparently near the vineyard. So far so good. Not usually feeling the wine vibe, but hey I’m saddled up and ready to ride. Yeehaw! In the shack we find a beautiful model - we’ll call her Logan - waking up next to her model-in-training little sister, whom we’ll call Ruby. They’re both sporting tattoos that look like the “doors open” elevator button. Not sure how that’ll come into play but color me intrigued. And they may be birthmarks, we don’t know at this point. Logan looks hellified sad, so she gets up and stares at her own beauty in the mirror for a bit. This cheers her up. More shots of the birthmark elevator tattoos.

Cut to the two as they leave the house and head down the street in head-to-toe Anthroplogie regalia. When they turn a corner Ruby looks like she’s seen a ghost. But it’s not a ghost. It’s worse. It’s ugly, poor people dressed like Mumford & Sons. The two look mortified. Granted, the dust bowlers throw around their fair share of shade, but c’mon, who needs the latest suburban mall fashions thrown in your face when you’ve spent the past eleven hours squeezing apple juice just to scrape enough pennies together to buy some oats. So, Logan and Ruby continue to get some serious what-the-fucks from Poor Ed Norton, Poor Tony Hale, Poor Viola Davis, Poor Jessica Chastain and Poor Kenny Rogers as they continue their stroll.

Finally, a young girl holding a basketful of empty dreams sees them and desperately wants to hang out. But the models ice her out like girls used to ice me out in high school. But this isn’t about me.

The sisters decide to take a load off and regroup on a fence after the harrowing experience of walking through a town filled with grubby townies. Ruby says to Logan in a super-bitchy way, “The others, they don’t like us. Why?” Logan can’t bring herself to say it, but we know her answer: “Because we’re pretty, Rubes. Because we’re pretty.” Instead, she wraps a bony arm around her little sister and holds her tight.

Cut back to the two in their stylish shack bed. Logan wakes up all sad once again. We think she’s about to take another hit of that sweet sweet mirror, but not today. In an act of astounding irresponsibility she decides to ditch her sister, hop on her Ralph Lauren saddle and blaze through the vineyard. Where’s she going? What’s she doing? Are they out of groceries? Is she going to find work? Is she going to make sure the local school system is adequate for a 9-year-old girl with model potential? Is she on her way to Stink-eye City to gun down the dust bowlers? Is she off to give Poor Kenny a good rogering? So many ways this could go.

Before we know it, she’s riding slow-mo through a river. Finally, she ends up in, you guessed it, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. The buildings make her happier than a loft full of mirrors. She ties her horse up to a phone pole and sets out through the seemingly deserted streets. But wait! She sees somebody. Holy fucklesticks, it’s another model! And she’s got the same birthmark. Could this be the mark of the beautiful? Holy Diet Coke, another model appears! And this one is a dude who makes Lenny Kravitz look like Edward James Olmos. They all hop in the back of a vintage truck and drive off. Boom, they’re out of the truck and into a line filled with more models, all with the mark of beauty. Why do they get to go to the front of the line? Because this girl is a bona fide asshole. That’s the kind of shit she does! No problem getting in because suddenly they’re jamming out at a packed show. That Swedish toolshed Aviccii is spinning mad beats on stage with his hat on backwards. Aloe Blacc is singing his nuts off and smiling from ear to ear thinking about the check he’s about to collect. Oh, and we have touchdown on the significance of the beauty mark. It's the unifying symbol for people who are really into looking cool and listening to Aviccii's progressive house-soul mashups. You see, it sort of looks like an A and a V. So that's what that is.

Someone breaks out a smartphone and takes a selfie of Logan and her new beauty buddies, even though they have yet to say one word to each other. Beauty doesn’t require banter. In fact, it only gets in the way. Logan is so happy, so carefree, so far away from those ugly rural buttholes!

Cut to her blazing through the vineyard on the horse that miraculously didn’t get stolen. Cut again to her slow-mo-ing it through the river in a stunning violation of editing continuity. She wakes her sister up and says something to the effect of, “Get your shit. I found a place where everybody is super hot and on ecstasy!”

But then they start walking down a highway. They don’t even take the horse! They leave the fucking horse! The horse is going to fucking starve!

And we haven’t even gotten to the worst part. The absolute worst part of the entire video is right at the end. They cut back to the sad, poor girl from earlier who just wanted some friends and to possibly get a killer makeover. But there she stands, alone on a sidewalk, staring longingly at a world she’ll never get to experience. So she turns away, resigned to a life of abject poverty and crushing loneliness. What the fuck man!

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