The third of my music video essays, I'm going after a band that I don't know at all, Highly Suspect. In fact, I only had their new music video, "My Name is Human", pop up in my YouTube recommendations list because a student had recommended the song to me. This one is '90s grunge released in 2016, so it's a genre that I'm familiar with and listened to a lot as a kid. Nevertheless, I'm tackling a band that I've never listened to, am not familiar with their discography, and, at the time of writing, have only seen the music video a couple of times (because it is so new). Additionally, this one has some swears in it, which I'm not usually down with. There's something in this song and music video, though, and so I'm going to break from my typical MO and let the f-bombs drop. As always, I do recommend watching the video whilst reading the lyrics.
The Set Up
Here's the video:
And here are the lyrics:
Okay
I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling myself
Fuck everyone else
Gotta remember that nobody is better than anyone else, here
(Do you need some time to think it over?)
Look what they do to you
Look what they do to me
Must be joking if you think that either one is free, here
Get up off your knees, girl
Stand face to face with your God
And find out what you are
(Hello, my name is human)
Hello, my name is human
And I came down from the stars
(Hello, my name is human)
I'm ready for love and I'm ready for war
But I'm ready for more
I know that nobody's ever been this fucking ready before, hey
(Do you need some time to think it over?)
So figure it out or don't figure it out
I figured it out
The bigger the river (the bigger the river)
The bigger the drought (the bigger the drought)
Get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your God
And find out what you are
(Hello, my name is human)
Hello, my name is human
And I came down from the stars
(Hello, my name is human)
Fire world, I love you
Fire world
I'm up off my knees, girl
I'm face to face with myself
And I know who I am
(Hello, my name is human)
I stole the power from the sun
I'm more than just a man
(No longer disillusioned)
(I'm not asking questions)
('Cause questions have answers)
(And I don't want answers)
I came down from the stars (so I'll take my chances)
(And what are the chances)
(That I could advance)
(On my own circumstances)
(Said "what are the chances?")
Hello, my name is human (and what are the chances?)
(I don't want your answers)
(I'm not asking questions)
(So you keep your answers)
And I know who I am (so you keep your answers)
(I'm not asking questions)
(I'm taking my chances)
The Intro
The structure of the song is pretty straightforward. Like most grunge and pop songs, it has an intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro composition. These are effective for developing themes and establishing a predictable outcomes. This also allows for reversals of themes or larger revelations to stand out in starker contrast. "My Name is Human" begins with an establishing riff that is also emphasized with imagery that is both emblematic of the whole, but unrepeated.The opening shot lets us see the starkly white warehouse in which the entire video happens. The slowly retreating camera (I'm not a film student, but I believe they're doing a dolly zoom for the entirety of the video) pulls away from the cloaked black figure. At first, the figure is being suspended by cables, but then a cut deletes them and the band's frontman, Johnny Stevens, walks into frame. The bassline has been buzzing for the entire sequence, but it's only after Stevens says "Okay" and rips off the shimmering black cloth to expose the still-black clad figure beneath that the guitar enters into the mix.
The deliberateness of the movements, along with Stevens' costuming choice and the sharp contrast of the white background and the dark clothing, are echoed in the way the song is unfolding. The octaves-higher riff of the guitar counteracts the throaty gravel of the bass. The darkness of the cloth is still reflective and shimmering; the face underneath is starkly white against the black. The interweaving of bass and treble, the yin-yang of the iconography, all push toward the theme of the piece: Being human.
The point of the video is contrast. The camera lingers on the manufacturing of a robot--built by robots, but less anthropomorphized than what the focal point of the shot gives us. The camera revolves and then the robot body revolves, giving a sense of vertigo and discombobulation. By beginning the shot with a tight closeup, this technique helps to disorient us while the zoom out gives us greater context. Stepping back, it seems, is the way in which one could achieve and perceive the theme better.
The last piece of the intro is its location. Because of the technique of the reverse shot (where Stevens is looking at the camera, then we see the robot being built, then Stevens again), we get the sense that Stevens is looking at the robot--and vice versa. However, I believe the robot and Stevens are in the same position--the same place. The building of the robot in the shape of a human is the same place of the already-built human; they're occupying the same space, which we, as the audience, are retreating from.
Building with Words
When Stevens sings, he belies the tattoos and piercings and dyed hair that scream "punk". His song even incorporates screaming vocals, yet he always remains placid, calm, and detached. He is not playing his instrument; his band is not behind him. There are no shots of the band members playing at all, and we never leave the sterile warehouse in which these robots are being built.
This creates a parallel between human and machine, the born and the built. Despite--or perhaps because of--the fact that he's coming to recognize his humanity, he depicts what a robot could best emulate: Cold uninterest*. But the themes of black on white--with white in black--is operating here. I've read Tao Te Ching, and I think there's a lot to be said about the Taoist principle of yin-yang. That there's some of the Other inside of everyone makes a lot of sense. This motif is captured again and again, but instead of a female/male human binary, we get the female (machine)/male (biological) binary.
Such a binary is complicated by the conceits of the lyrics. Not only is there the typical punk sentiments of isolation and rebellion at the beginning ("I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling myself / Fuck everyone else"), but the ideas of omnipresent uniformity and the cynicism that accompanies it infuse the rest of the verse. The world that Stevens is building via his language is the manufacturing plant, a place where assembly occurs, where man makes machines by making man work like machines by making man interface with machines. What Deleuze and Guattari might call "deterritorialization" transpires here: The liminal areas break down in unexpected directions, only to be reformed within (and without) the predictable territories. Stevens' warehouse is a locus of self-assembly and deliberate design. In this, he's an inheritor of the Miltonic Satan (Paradise Lost V.859-861):
We know no time when we were not as now;This concept of self-begetting, of self-creation, is driven home visually by the gradual improvement of the robotic self--going from the nebulous shape of the robot covered to the beginnings of its form at the ends of robotic arms to the pulsating light where the heart would be beneath the flesh-toned robot to the nude-but-incomplete form sitting on the table to the one finally tailored and accepted by the human at the end. That the only time there is "improvement" or involvement by human hands is near the end, and it is only to trim away the tulle from the ballerina's dress, drives home the importance--and impossibility--of the Satanic conceit.
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd
By our own quick'ning power,
It's interesting to note that, by the end of the song, the robot is fully human, save her eyes. The robotic legs, hovering over the ornate carpet whilst Stevens trims the tulle, are gone, replaced with shapely, human legs. The deterritorialization/reterritorialization process is complete. As Deleuze and Guattari say (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 21), "Since articulated sound was a deterritorialized noise but one that will be reterritorialized in sense, it is now sound itself that will be deterritorialized irrevocably, absolutely." The articulated sounds of the music requires the imposition of sense and order, one that's reterritorialized in the perception of the music. The images and the sound coalesce this way, building up the concept of giving/taking, appropriating/releasing. The tension between these senses are, in some fundamental ways, what it means to be human.
Getting Off of Your Knees
Each time the chorus starts, Stevens shifts to whom he's speaking. Chorus one: "Get up off your knees, girl." Chorus two: "Get up off your knees, boy." Chorus three: "I'm up off my knees, girl." Twice he invokes the gender of the recipient of the order; in the end, he goes back to the first, to let her know that he has followed his own advice. But here the subversion of the pattern becomes important. When addressing the other genders (ostensibly, addressing all of humankind through the labels, though perhaps it makes it more inclusive to think of the female/male binary as ends on a spectrum than inherently contiguous and exclusionary), he demands that they "Stand face to face with your God / And find out what you are" (emphasis mine). When discussing his own experience with the same invocation--or, perhaps, as one providing a testimonial of what will happen when his pattern is followed--he sings, "I'm face to face with myself" thereby replacing God and putting himself there--again, the Satanic conceit--"And I know who I am" (emphasis mine). Because the predictability of the song's structure, as well as the endlessly same camera tricks throughout the video, the modification of the pattern drives home his message much more effectively. Being human is about shifting from something to someone.
This is the reason the music video shows the evolution of the human robot. I don't think it's a mistake that, of all the genders that one could pick for a robot, Highly Suspect chose a woman. There's always a problem of objectification of women (it's so pervasive that pointing it out is like noting when it's snowing outside during the winter--a banal, obvious observation), and in this video, the woman is literally assembled. Her body isn't lingered on in any overtly sexual way, and I would contest that even the time when she's set up on display, nude, the placement and usage isn't inherently exploitative. The fact that she's covered in spines and has imperfect pieces jutting out of her only enhances the concept of self-discovery being a long, painful experience.
That isn't to say there aren't some things that could be read as problematic from a feminist angle: She's incomplete until she's finally modified by a man, she takes her cues from the man (during the quasi-Shakespearean allusion of Stevens holding her head and contemplating her, a la Hamlet in act 5 scene 1 as he soliloquizes about Yorick), she is kept behind glass and her expressions of distress are only musical--the guitar solo being her voice. These pieces fold into the theme, however: That through the process of discovering one's humanity, the system that allowed and created the discovery in the first place is entirely human, entirely flawed.
My Name Is Human
Despite these issues, I find the music video a fascinating addition to the lyrical components. The myriad of voices, interplaying lyrics, and overlapping sounds--percussive, string, vocal--at the end builds into a frenzy, but is mirrored and mimicked by the proliferation of additional robots. They're all the same--they'd been slowly creeping into the warehouse throughout the video. At one point, one robot is considering a severed robot arm, as if trying to understand the connection between this Other that looks identical to her/it and what that could mean. Then, in the closing shots, the room is filled with line upon line of robots, all uniform--all the same. Each is supposed to go through the same process of self-discovery that the song is advocating, the movement from created to human--at least, that's what we're left to suppose.
Becoming human...being human...these concepts are so deeply personal, complicated, and flawed that it's little wonder people turn to religion, science, or other sorts of organization--what Bogdanov called tektology--in order to seek guidance. Despite their name, it isn't highly suspect to turn toward others to gain insight, help, and hope.
Indeed, I think that's part of what makes us human.
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* Okay, I know it's petty, but it bothers me when people use "disinterest" to mean "not interested", because "disinterest" means "unbiased", and I try to use words correctly whenever I can.