I like and sometimes love Lykke Li’s songs depending on which one you are talking about, but I was not totally in love with her last album ‘I Never Learn’… She cultivates heartbreaks as if there were bottomless penuries of them, and all these lyrics about fallen love, loneliness, ache and tears… ouch! It hurts so bad after a while.
‘Gunshot’ is no exception, with lyrics like: ‘I am longing for your poison/Like a cancer for its prey/Shot an arrow, in your harbor/Where you waited in the rain/I am siren, I am ivy/I am no one, I’m nobody/I am longing for your honey/I am longing for your love/And the shot goes through my head and back/Gunshot, I can’t take it back’…it’s just painful, but the video Lykke Li has just released for the song may be even more agonizing.
Filmed in Paris and directed by Fleur & Manu (M83, Tricky), Lykke Li, wearing a strange white make-up and a kaki raincoat, dances in the middle of nowhere’s parking lot – a deserted end-of-the-world type of place – then encounters people lifting weights or girls tweaking,… she is shut by a kid’s handgun, jumps above cars, is run over by a dirt bike… what is that about exactly? Nobody seems to agree if you read some of the comments on Youtube, but everyone is looking for a deep meaning behind these images,… just because it’s Lykke Li, it must be deep. She may be a ghost, a wandering spirit, a lost person reliving the past, a schizophrenic… But there’s this deep large crack in the concrete, which has to be a symbol for separation, plus she says ‘My heart cracked’ in the song… still the video is not very inspired.
This led me to think about music videos in general, do we really need them? They generally don’t explain the song (and shouldn’t) they often bring confusion, and if some are really creative, others can be just painful to watch.
