There’s a new Bon Iver video and it’s maybe the trippiest thing you’ve ever seen
Bon Iver released their lyric video for the song “____45_____” from their new album 22, a Million and it’s… we’re not sure what to say about it, actually. It’s mind-bending, somewhat aggravating, trippy, aesthetically beautiful, transfixing.
The visuals illustrate the musicality of the song closely, featuring trumpets at the beginning, when you hear trumpets (guessing those are trumpets?) in the song.
The song’s lyrics appear on screen in a Wes Anderson-yellow.
As the melody becomes less precise, so does the visual: The images on screen begin melting into an oil slick, slowly getting stirred. A still frame of some friends in a field is just clear enough to see the individual figures, but the oil slick is still getting mixed, the image becoming more and more abstract.
Eventually, the video, the lyrics and the melody together begin to closely resemble that terrible breakup you went through last year, that catapulted you into a downward spiral, where life no longer made sense, you couldn’t see straight, your peripheral vision closed in and everything became a blur.
I stayed down The other night I stayed down Without knowing What the truth is
The blur lasted for months, but eventually things started to manifest into tangible objects again, you could make things out, the world reassembled itself. We hoped for that kind of resolution with this video, but it doesn’t end on such an optimistic note, as the colors separate and dissolve into blackness, the remaining tendrils resembling the earth from space, as if its just been blown apart.
Obviously, we’re deeply moved by this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=898oItg-XIU?feature=oembed
And isn’t that what art is supposed to do?
