It’s interesting! This is how this new Conor Oberst video ends and I guess this could be a general comment for the whole thing,… interesting. The black and white video illustrates the song ‘Zigzagging Toward the Light’ off his recently released album ‘Upside Down Mountain’, but it is a bit more than that. It’s a short movie with dialogues evoking the ones on the Bright Eyes albums, but also the Spike Jonze’s film ‘Her, as a disembodied sexy female voice interviews Conor at the top of a tall Manhattan building in 2024. It sets the tone for the rest of the story, part futuristic post-apocalypse, part utopia, part dream? Flashback to the present, just a few days before the apocalypse, Conor sings the song while walking in the streets of New York, and records his voice with a tiny digital recorder… Interesting! Is this Conor Oberst’s vision of the world? Does he want our world to collapse? ‘How did it feel to not have electricity?’ asked the voice.
Rolling Stone speculates that this is the expression of Conor’s rejection of technology, since he recently expressed his disdain for his iPhone with a ‘staring into this bullshit all day’ and has been very vocal about his dislike of social media: ‘I don’t know if it makes me an asshole to not want to talk to my fans. But I’m not going to sit on a fucking computer and try to talk to some fucking 16-year-old in wherever-the-fuck.’ It was a sentiment expressed again during his conversation with Lorde. ‘You don’t really do social media?’, she asked him, ‘No, I don’t mess with any of that stuff’, he answered, ‘But I’m from a different time. I’m old school. I don’t feel I owe my fans pictures of what I eat for breakfast or my thoughts on every pointless thing that’s happening in the world. But that’s what’s expected of people now. They want more and more original content, or whatever the code words are, for basically self-promotion. That’s tough. I think there’s something to be said for some mystery left in the world.’ So this is a real concern for Conor, the lack of mystery and the omnipresence of the cameras,… ‘the camera is everywhere’ says the female voice in the video, making him a bit uncomfortable.
Okay we get it, he is afraid of the omnipresence of technology in our society, to this, add the fact that, 10 years from now, Conor will wear his hair longer, will need glasses, will shave with an old fashioned razor (because no electricity!) but will be interviewed by a computer? … It doesn’t make sense unless these OS have totally transcended electricity and reached some god-like status, and in this case we should worry. One last thing, with so much distraction, I totally forgot to listen to the song.
