I Was Provoked

I was fishing around the internets to find something to complain about (due to a fairly bland American Idol episode last night) and ended up on Blender Magazine's website. In their blog section I noticed the newest blog's title was "The Year's Most Provocative Music Video" and my interest was provoked. I rarely see music videos, for they have gone the way of the snow leopard. They are hard to find and I'm too lazy to go looking.

With the help of an embedded YouTube movie:

The snoozefest known as Dizzee Rascal: “Sirens” by Director: W.I.Z. is a British rapper's political piece against...uh...racial profiling? Here is the write-up by Blender:

In the most recent issue of Blender, there’s an excellent piece by Dorian Lynskey on the plight of "hoodies" in England. The term has come to define a spectral type of hood-wearing troublesome youth that many--including the British government--have come down upon in recent years with petty restrictions. But, while so-called hoodies have been responsible for some violence, statistics show the idea of an out-of-control teen gangs looting and stabbing their way through life has been largely manufactured by the media. London rapper Dizzee Rascal takes this controversy and spikes it with racial signifiers in his remarkably powerful video for “Sirens.” The clip has a group of pale, red-coated fox hunters (old England) chasing after a hoodie'd Dizzee (new England) as if he were just another piece of prey. Brilliantly filmed by prodigious video director W.I.Z., “Sirens” is provocative, suspenseful and, above all else, unsettling in its depiction of Britain’s current culture wars.

This video is neither "remarkable" or "powerful." This video takes a long time to make a single point which is entirely literal. White people on a fox hunt chasing a black man through the streets at night with a repetitive lethargic hip hop soundtrack. I'm not a fan of hip hop. It has its moments, but overall I dislike the fact that it is sometimes elevated so eagerly to some high level artistic plane. I just have a hard time appreciating this song and video as "provocative, suspensful, and above all else, unsettling" when the song is about a guy getting chased by "Sirens" and the video shows him being chased. Wow, thats powerful stuff.