Music Mosaic: Seeing Ratatat's "Seventeen Years"

One December night we raced down the freeway with the windows fogged and Ratatat’s Seventeen Years booming. I made up a melody with lousy lyrics, my friend began to spit babbling rhymes, and our third friend, choir-trained, added a golden harmony from the backseat. We slipped through traffic and the dark, improvising.

Annie Dillard wrote that “the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult.” Seventeen Years was only that mad rush through the dark, the lights of other cars blurred by the condensation we couldn’t clear, so to listen and somehow, simultaneously, see – “tormentingly difficult”, indeed.

I attempted to first capture the clearest feeling. A high synthesizer wails, tight but keen: it feels like infatuation. Infatuation is its own isolated universe, shining and confused and colorful, so I cut out a night sky, pasted it onto an explosion, and added color, diamonds, and a couple to cuddle in this tiny world.

Then I tried desperately to convey that night and the rich darkness, the cacophony of nonsense we strung into music. I depicted the rap stuttering along, out-of-focus; the melody rose, fuchsia; and the harmony rolled, golden and curved, over and through them. I grabbed magazines and listened to Seventeen Years, cutting out anything that looked like the song felt. Thus the next collage was atmospheric: hushed jewel tones and reflections, unfamiliar patterns and crowded cities. Seventeen Years is a rich, layered, contemplative urban jungle.

As I watched for colors, I felt the rhythm instead. I found a picture of African women marching and drawings of thick arrows. Glued together, their joint march pulsed on like the beat. But the beat slipped into darkness, and I suggested that creeping stillness with a photo of the Aurora Borealis laid behind snow-covered pines and inverted rocky slopes. I ripped the edges because the descent feels less polished than primeval.

I ended at the beginning: a few lines are spoken, a high synthesizer warbles into being, and suddenly – the drop. I made it literal: a streak of red falls and explodes into dust and smoke and tiny fragments. What else could I see? National Geographic, the magazine from which I cut, showcased dozens of photographers looking into the dark and seeing. In Whale Whisperers, Anuar Patjane looked into the sea and saw light, shadows, majesty. So I closed my eyes and sketched what I saw in the dark: a man with a crooked nose, leather-jacketed, a little smooth, with lots of swagger.

At last, in the dark, a thing I hadn’t yet seen. Just halfway through, the bass enters, grey and nearly unnoticed. Like the collage, he walks into and through the levels of the song like a stranger learning a city before he disappears entirely into its walls.

Ratatat: Seventeen Years

PURPOSE and Collaborative New Media (Thinking & Writing)

PURPOSE: The Movement is a series of music videos created to accompany Justin Bieber’s most recent album, Purpose. Together, the videos create a short film. As a unique marketing device, Bieber began to release them on the hour, every hour on his VEVO account the day after his album’s release. Jeff Beer of Fast Company’s Co.Create, a business magazine that focuses on “creativity in the converging worlds of advertising, entertainment, and technology”, remarked that “considering that singles are the dominant song form in pop music, it's intriguing to see how much of the marketing around Justin Bieber's new album revolves around the entire album.” Perhaps consequentially, Purpose had the biggest first-week sales of the year and the largest debut since Taylor Swift’s 1989 in 2014. Purpose became Bieber’s “best-selling launch ever” (USA Today).

PURPOSE: The Movement has a predecessor: Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled album, which includes 14 songs and 17 videos. Like Bieber’s videos, it was released unannounced sometime in the middle of the night. Bieber, however, does more than emulate Queen Bey; he draws from and relies upon various pop-culture phenomena. Beers puts it this way: “It’s like Bieber has completely bought into the Netflix model of binge-watching and applied it to music videos.” Bieber put more than just the current binge-mentality to work: Twitter was used to market the project as well, with Bieber’s passionate fans essentially doing the job for him.

However, what Bieber and his choreographer, Parris Goebel, are best at adopting for their use is not just binge-happy Beliebers’ willingness to lap up new hourly music videos, but that fusion of mediums that has become more and more prevalent with the digital age. Bieber’s videos rely heavily, of course, on his music and Goebel’s choreography (and skilled team of dancers). What makes PURPOSE: The Movement a valuable step forward in the arts, however, is the particular combination of adoption and adaptation: Beyoncé, Twitter, binge-watching, clever marketing schemes, film, choreography that is at times simultaneously sexual and emotional, street dancing, costume, and sleek production design.

The series of short films are clearly used as a tool to manage Bieber’s “bad boy” reputation, to reinvent him as a mature man who’s learned from his mistakes. The intro video, “Mark My Words”, combines older footage of him cussing out the paparazzi with footage of overwhelming, endless crowds of screaming fans and a Bieber voiceover telling us that he had lost his purpose, but that he’s found it now. There’s even a shot of Bieber standing behind a waterfall with his arms raised triumphantly, and he continues with the voiceover, saying that he wants fans to think: “Hey, if Justin did it, then I can do it.”

The first two videos, ”Mark My Words” and “I’ll Show You”, are clear references to Bieber’s mistakes, apology, and reformation. In the former, he shuffles on a wooden piano in the middle of the desert and sings, “Oh, I don’t want to live a lie,” and explains in the latter: “Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing when the pressure's coming down like lightning. It's like they want me to be perfect when they don't even know that I'm hurting.”

The edgy, street-wise choreography in “I’ll Show You” prepares us for the rest of the film however, and we find out by the next two tracks that this project is mainly about Bieber’s music and his collaboration with Goebel. If PURPOSE: The Movement, were only about restoring his image, it could be considered a failure. After all, nine days into the new year, Bieber has already gotten into trouble in Mexico (The Guardian), with some sources saying he mooned other tourists and officials at a Mayan ruins site (TMZ). But PURPOSE: The Movement is more than a smooth PR exercise.

“What Do You Mean?” is the first song and video to shake us out of PR-land. The colors are saturated, the dancers are sassing, and the camera rolls through a schoolyard, dizzy and frenzied, until the video switches to “Sorry”, a brightly-outfitted girl gang dancing their brashest best. The dancing itself is a kind of sexual, staccato, almost stop-motion attitude that brags so loudly we think it really must be saying something.

“Love Yourself” is a simple little piece of didacticism told through “cute modern dance” (The Inquisitr). The colors are cold and neutral, the set is claustrophobic: the featured couple dances from their bed to the narrow hallway, from there to more tiny spaces. It’s only a sassy send-off to an ex, but neatly told. “Company”’s super-saturated neon lights and half-darkness are a perfect visual to express Bieber’s lyrics, essentially a come-on, while “No Pressure” uses black-and-white coloring and dramatic spotlights to focus in on the desperate dancer trying to get his girl back. In “No Sense”, with sleazy red lights and another fairly sexualized choreography, the dancers twerk and the camera shakes with them, a clever trick: this is a hazy world in which even a twerk can unsettle.

There is heavy sentimentality, such as in the ballad “Life is Worth Living”, where an angel hugs a girl with a bullet wound in her chest, and in “Children”, an anthem featuring child activists, in which Bieber sings, “What about the children?” But on “Purpose”, the last video, Bieber is back in the desert, neutral-clad girls clinging to him – maybe his desperate fans. He leaves them there and walks away into the desert. “I’m not giving myself grace, I’m just like understanding that’s how it is,” he narrates, as he solemnly sprinkles a handful of sand on his shoulder like some desert baptism.

SPIN Magazine noted: “These songs had to be good enough to shift an entire career’s narrative on their own. They did.” But more than what they do for Bieber’s career is what they do for artists. There is now a mainstream, marketable precedent for this kind of collaboration, which has potential to foster braver work yet.