AIDS Wolf: "Catholic for Rent"

Since we all recognize the principal function of a music video to be the translation of sounds into appropriate images, directors have gotten significant mileage out of deliberately doing the opposite. Pairing a song’s aesthetic with its visual inversion—a slasher-themed clip for a pop song, for instance—is, like most music video “angles,” a pretty superficial gimmick. Pairing conflicting visual and aural styles doesn’t surprise or confound us like it’s intended to because the trick itself seems so obvious. But Exploding Motor Car’s new production, which takes as its subject (albeit somewhat loosely) AIDS Wolf’s “Catholic for Rent,” approaches that same basic concept in such a genuinely new and refreshing way that it seems frankly incredible that nobody’s thought of this exact execution before.

Their spin on the premise is simple: a small production crew arrives at AIDS Wolf’s studio to film a cliched music video in which fog machines and strobe lights make it nearly impossible for the band to perform, all of which—the video itself and its in-progress development—is presented to us, for several minutes at least, in a pretty typical mockumentary style. But the mid-video “twist,” in which the video production is interrupted by the band suddenly defecating uncontrollably before being literally attacked by the very shit which results, is, silly as it may sound, actually kind of revelatory. Here’s a band with a uniquely defined, resolutely anti-commercial sound, attempting to produce a standard rock-style music video—a medium for which their brand of extremely abrasive no-wave couldn’t be less appropriately suited—suddenly halting the process, restoring their pride in repulsion, and delving straight into outright shit. Here’s a band for whom the very idea of the music video is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy of their work, so what better way both to subvert our expectations of the format and, amusingly enough, to create an appropriate visual analog to accompany their music than to dismantle the video by confronting us with aggressive, renegade turds? The “fake” spot being developed in the opening of the video, the straight-forwardly dark project built around the ‘in-your-face’ veneer provided by a fog machine and a strobe light, is, like the punk rock building blocks “Catholic for Rent” shreds through, presented only as an outmoded template for the band to deconstruct. AIDS Wolf don’t simply darken established conventions, they attempt to subvert and undermine them entirely. Fitting, then, that their music video should reflect exactly that tendency.