Video: Whitest Boy Alive: "Golden Cage"
Last year saw an embarrassment of fan-created, band-endorsed videos for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Tilly and the Wall, and Barenaked Ladies, among others. It was funny how you could guess how a band sounded based on what their fans made-- Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans imitated Karen O's signature wild style, while Barenaked fans sent in dork-ass footage of bedroom air-guitaring.
Whitest Boy Alive, the electro/not electro project of Erlend Øye, got a fan-made video that fits their aesthetic well. Filmmaker and fan Mauro Vecchi won the contest (held by Italian online TV station QOOB TV) with his streamlined and sparse video of optical illusions. The Moire Effect, Reutersvard triangle, and Mobius strip are all explained and demonstrated in candy colors and large text. It may be the first video that could rightly be called 'infotainment' since Van Halen's "Right Now".
Each word that appears, each creation and breakdown of an optical illusion, is set perfectly to Whitest Boy Alive's clean-to-a-fault drumbeat. The video introduces itself with the text "now have a break"-- fitting, since "Golden Cage" feels like a palate-cleanser to be played between messier vidoes: it's unemotional, precise, and cautious.