Geneva Jacuzzi’s song Casket is modern synth-pop. It sounds like it could have been made in the early 80s; a cross between The Human League’s “Don’t you Want Me” and Shriekback’s “Nemesis.” It’s quite catchy and upbeat, despite an obvious layer of terror lurking just beneath the surface. The video, directed by Chris Friend, is, though, decidedly not from the 80s. It’s full of wild computer generated images, very unusual characters and a severed head being carried around in a box.
But let’s take a step back for a moment. First, Geneva Jacuzzi is the name of a performance artist who is a performance artist as well as a musician. Her works and installations have been shown ini the Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, The Broad Museum, Vooruit, Kampnagel, and other museums around the world. She was originally known for her home recordings, but then went on to record a full length album, Lamaze, in 2010. This song, casket, is part of her latest set of recordings, Technophelia, released on the appropriately named, Medical Records. According to her bio, her music is, “uncompromisingly obtuse synth-driven pop.” What it means for music to be obtuse is not entirely clear. But you may well feel obtuse while watching the video because the story it relates is quite difficult to understand. Luckily, there is a description that explains it in part.
The video is ostensibly set in Los Angeles in 2066 and follows someone named Kate Shaw. Ms. Shaw has to make a delivery of something called Emote Cartridges, but she’s going to be late. She expects that she will be executed by the world’s central government. In this situation she clearly has no choice but to sever her robotic assistant’s head and carry it around in a bag with her. All the while, the amputated head flood Kate’s brain with strange visions. The visions seem to be the computer generated bugs and creatures floating through the screen. She seems to try to flee to an area that has suffered a nuclear attack, but then ends up in a Venusian Mental Prism Prison. Without the description I would not have been able to make sense of this story at all. With the description, I’m somewhat better off.
The story is perhaps meant to be a warning about a dystopian future we may face if we’re not careful about things like Artificial Intelligence. There’s a quote in support of this theory at the opening of the video: “If Cybernetics if the science of control, management is the profession of control,” (Anthony Stafford Beer, 1966). This seems to indicate that the world of technology has taken over the world of politics in 2066 and that the world government, which I believe may be represented here by a giant pyramid, is now being operated by machines. Maybe this is meant to be a colourful and playful riff on a world like the one we see in the classic film from 1984 The Terminator.
The lyrics seem to be disconnected from the story we’re watching. Read on their own, I would have said that the lyrics are about one going to a funeral home and wanted the deceased person to come back to life, and, as we hear over and over in the song, “talk the lids into lifting again.” Or perhaps it’s a lament from a corpse who’d rather not be dead? the lyrics, though are more squarely focused on death and caskets than the video is. Is there some connection here? Is this about pining for the loss of human autonomy and a yearning to give people back their freedom? It’s very hard to say.
The video is complex and fun, but I’m not sure that the story or the lyrics are really the key to understanding what it’s really all about. More helpful is the description provided by the Hollywood studio that provided the video. They describe it simply as, “ A futuristic head trip.” And perhaps that’s really all we need to know and attempts to understand or put into words will simply detract from our enjoyment of the music and the nebulous, and yes, perhaps even obtuse, images we see on the screen.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.