Watermelons, vagina mouths and penis noses feature in our pick of the month’s best videos
This month’s best music videos include Powell smashing watermelons, Rae Sremmurd smashing guitars, and Sampha smashing cars. There’s also an appearance from a literal dick-head in Anklepants’ completely bananas new clip. Check out our picks below.
ANKLEPANTS – “JUST ONE OF THE GUYS”
Anklepants is Reecard Farché, a fictional 17th-century character created by an electronic musician and prosthetics/animatronics wizard. Anklepants’ most distinctive characteristic is pretty hard to ignore – a big ol’ robotic penis swings from the front of his mask – but “Just One Of The Guys” is a great song too, a melancholic blend of glitchy, Kompakt-esque tech and post-punk that shows there’s more to the artist than a weird look. Its video has been a long time in the making and shows Anklepants searching for the rare Edelweiss mountain flower in the Austrian mountains. The story is tragic, but really, you won’t be able to take your eyes off Anklepants’ mask while you watch.
PEACHES – “SICK IN THE HEAD”
Peaches’ new video is a triumph of DIY creativity. Shot on an iPhone by Peaches and a crew of just three others, it shows the subversive performer raving inside a tunnel (actually the inside of a giant inflatable erection that she uses in her live performances) wearing blonde extensions, a black catsuit and demonic facepaint – not to mention a literal realisation of vagina dentata on her crotch. “The tube that I dance in... only has a tiny hole at the end so the iPhone lens was the only one that fit,” Peaches said about the video. “There is so much movement happening when I’m inside the tube but the camera actually never moves.”
POWELL – “JONNY” (FT JONNY)
Powell is an electronic musician whose tracks have a similarly anarchic attitude to industrial music, punk rock, EBM, Belgian new beat and underground techno. He also hosts a show on London’s NTS Radio called Melon Magic, which is the inspiration for his latest video for “Jonny”, featuring ‘Jonny’ AKA Jonnine Standish of minimal wave duo HTRK. It shows Powell, his mates and some fans attempting to smash a bunch of watermelons with their heads and, occasionally, with more creative means. The footage was shot on a recent North American tour, while fans sent in their own videos after Powell advertised his email address on public billboards. Good, messy fun.
RAE SREMMURD – “BLACK BEATLES” (FT GUCCI MANE)
Rae Sremmurd continue a long tradition of black musicians adopting conventionally white iconography – think of the rapper Black Cobain, or Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” – with their “Black Beatles” video. In it, the rap duo reimagine themselves as the Fab Four and live the life depicted in classic tour documentaries. They play shows to thousands of screaming women, subtly recreate the Abbey Road cover, reimagine the group’s legendary rooftop concert, and – surely heresy to dads across the world – pretend to play guitars when the track was clearly made on a computer. As a bonus, the recently freed Gucci Mane turns up halfway through looking superfly, too.
SAMPHA – “BLOOD ON ME”
If “Blood On Me” is anything to go by, UK singer Sampha’s debut album Process is shaping up to be killer. Its video is a worthy complement to the song, full of striking and very peculiar imagery. In it, Sampha gets pursued by greyhounds across a dog track, intercut with footage of the singer-songwriter running through a field in England wearing his already-iconic yellow jacket. It’s odd, but otherwise relatively straightforward – at least up until Sampha finds himself in a car halfway up a tree. Long story short, Sampha himself ends up turning into a tree, and the car falls to the ground.