Out of curiosity, I just sat down and watched the full music video for 'Party Rock Anthem', and I don't know whether it's accidental but it's a genuinely brilliant bit of horror storytelling.
For those who've not seen it, the video for 'Party Rock Anthem' begins with a parody sequence based on 28 Days Later, where the song's architects wake from a coma caused by excessive party rocking around the single's release, to find an abandoned world.
Wandering out of the hospital, they see someone in the distance dancing mindlessly on the spot, to the muted sounds of 'Party Rock Anthem'. Before the artists can engage the man, they're bundled to the ground by an anxious figure in office attire.
As the figure warns them that civilisation has collapsed due to the release of 'Party Rock Anthem', we see why - another nervous survivor emerges further up the street, but is soon surrounded by more mindless revellers emerging from the smoking street debris.
The man crosses himself, but it's no good - as the song's lyrics euphorically promise that it will make us 'lose our minds', he is swallowed by the mob. Moments later, he explodes from the crowd, reborn with shutter shades and a captain's hat, and begins to advance menacingly.
He's a genuinely unnerving figure, and the video's protagonists react with terror before the survivor tells them their only hope is to play along and act like they've been infected. And so they begin to dance to Party Rock Anthem.
So far, so pedestrian, right? It's a fairly simple pastiche of zombie pandemic cliches. But this is where the video to Party Rock Anthem gets seriously dark.
It's because the skit _never ends_. Usually, narrative music videos bookend songs with an acted prelude & a matching coda which resolves things - like 'Thriller', right? I expected a coda for Party Rock Anthem where the heroes either got infected or escaped... but it never came.
The video starts off as a spoof thriller, with the heroes faking this boneheaded dance to try and sneak past the infected, but it _ends_ as a completely bog standard boneheaded dance music video, with all narrative forgotten as if it never happened. The implication is horrendous.
There's no moment where we see the heroes' disguise fail and the infected close in. We can only assume, from the change in the video's genre, that the act of doing is the dance is enough to invoke the plague; their consciousness is annihilated without them even knowing it.
They have indeed lost their minds; their lives - at least as conscious entities - are over. And death isn't even an *event*. It just happens, probably a few bars into the first verse. We start the video watching two fellow travellers in space and time, but end it profoundly alone
Get up, get down put your hands up to the sound.
Get up, get down put your hands up to the sound.
Get up, get down put your hands up to the sound.
Put your hands up to the sound.
Put your hands up to the sound.
Get up, get down put your hands up to the sound.
Get up, get down put your hands up to the sound.
Put your hands up to the sound.
Put your hands up to the sound.
Are we the same people we were before we listened to 'Party Rock Anthem', or are we entirely new entities, which happen to have inherited their memories?
This is also my headcanon for Robocop, by the way. Murphy dies on the operating table. The entity that wakes up in the famous POV sequence is not him, but an AI with the ability to read the memories stored in the brain of a resuscitated dead man.
I think that's my theory of Robocop, anyway. I remember having a heated row about it with @dtmooreeditor and @allwrongthink at 3am at 9W once, but I have no idea who thought what or where we ended up.
