Photo: Screenshot
There is a huge amount of misogyny is contemporary music. Please use that sentence as a litmus test for your tolerance of this article - if you found yourself exclaiming out loud, "No there isn't!" or "Not all men!" then please close the tab, I wish you a lifetime of happiness.
If you've made it to this paragraph, excellent! We can start zooming the lens a little. Namely, the new Mini Mansions video for 'Vertigo', starring Alex Turner and miscellaneous topless women. It might, sort of, in a way, be a little bit like 'Blurred Lines'... except the song is actually really good, and so are Mini Mansions and Alex Turner, so we're all really keen for it not to be. So is it? Is 'Vertigo' as objectifying and creepy and cluttered with lechery as 'Blurred Lines'? No, it isn't. But it didn't make me jump for joy.
Watch the video for Mini Mansions feat. Alex Turner 'Vertigo' below
Let's make it clear at this point that any hesitant defence of this video is in no way aligned with YouTube commenter Sydnee Ragland, who writes, "I hate how people are freaking out about there being shirtless girls in the video. If it was a bunch of shirtless guys standing there no one would have said anything. please get over yourselves." Sigh. Sadly, for Mr Ragland's wildly original reverse-sexism argument to have any weight, men and women would have to occupy exactly equal positions in society. They don't. Women are sexualised and objectified to a chronically greater extent than men.
Showing naked women in art though, is not necessarily sexist. The 'Vertigo' video is problematic, because of the context in which it exists - where women are so often reduced to sex objects while the men remain fully-clothed - but to align it with 'Blurred Lines' is a little reductive.
There's plenty of things about the video that made me feel a little queasy: towards the start, when the camera pans out from a woman's lingerie-clad crotch to reveal Mikey Shuman photographing her, fully clothed; a caped figure feeding two kneeling women pizza; naked women in comedy glasses on the floor gazing up at another fully-clothed man. These are frustrating because, once again, the women are shown as passive objects, there not to do but to be done to.
But elsewhere in the surreal medley of strange Lynchian imagery, a woman picks up a telephone while smoke billows behind her; another appears on a TV screen with headphones on, screaming; another in a khaki coat aims a gun at the camera, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, warpaint on her cheeks. Of course we later see it from a different angle, and she's got no trousers on, but you can't win them all, eh?
The video for 'Blurred Lines' is offensive and damaging and terrible, because the women are so passive and so homogenous, and because of the disgusting gaze of Pharrell and Robin Thicke (who's got a big dick.) The women in 'Vertigo', at least, are distinguishable from one another, and have their own part to play aside from being sex objects.
The 'Vertigo' video is not the indie 'Blurred Lines'. It's more imaginative and surreal and less abhorrent than 'Blurred Lines' and its lyrics aren't, to quote The Daily Beast, "kind of rapey." It also firmly establishes itself as entirely absurdist. But was there really any reason, other than to appease the male gaze, for almost all of the women to be topless? Probably not.
