Apr 032014
Just looking for a reality check here. I want to know which of these two rock vuh-deos possesses the greatest amount of:
a) Trendy, artsy coolness and what-not (warning: you may have to really think through that one before answering!)
b) Rock/hairy balls factor
c) Likely/proven rock “influence”
d) Shoe/boot and other important style superpowers
e) “Animality”
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
I never realised Thin Lizzy was still together after about 1980.
Good god, does anyone do the Rock Squat better than Phil Lynott? Game over about 3 seconds into this showdown.
I don’t think you picked a very fair comparison. Jack’s video is for an instrumental and it’s kind of a soundtrack to the weirdness going on in it. Jack doesn’t have a chance on half of your questions because he’s not even in it and doesn’t get to bring any superpowers whatsoever. I call shenanigans! Use this random video from his last album instead:
http://youtu.be/s92smjLq_38
a) Trendy, artsy coolness and what-not (warning: you may have to really think through that one before answering!)
B-movie title, retro muscle car – trendy as hell.
b) Rock/hairy balls factor
Hemi? That’s got the hairy balls down, but I’ll give The Rocker that one. But you picked Thin Lizzy’s best song ever and it’s barely holding on to one of the songs on Jack’s first solo album.
c) Likely/proven rock “influence”
Dude’s bringing back the hot pants biker cop. Jack wins that one!
d) Shoe/boot and other important style superpowers
I gotta call that a tie. Can’t see Jack’s footwear so well, but the sunglasses, leather jacket and two pounds of metal on his fingers while he plays his guitar are as good as Phil’s awesome stripper shoes.
e) “Animality”
I think you have to explain this category more for me. I’m leaning towards Jack because he’s getting pretty manhandled and has to go to prison and all. Granted, it’s Caged Heat Prison and he’s a dude, so it might not be a terrible sentence, but still. Thin Lizzy’s just floating in air and rocking out.
I’m leaning towards Jack White in a fair fight.
2K makes excellent points – and as stoked as the chick is dancing in the background of the Thin Lizzy video, she shows no sideboob, but with so little artifice Thin Lizzy delivers so mach schau that it’s not funny. White doesn’t execute a single Rock Squat. Lynott and the guitarist are dropping Rock Loads all over the place. The only band that may give Thin Lizzy a run for its Rock Squatting money is Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Those guys know how to drop one Chinese public shithole style!
Please excuse this uncharacteristic torrent of scatological references, but “The Rocker” really brought it out in me.
I think the Rock Squat probably morphed from Chuck Berry’s Duckwalk.. I’m sure guys wanted to Duckwalk, but it was considered old fashioned by that time. So these days, the Rock Squat is old fashioned. Jack probably wouldn’t do one unless he was trying to be funny, retro or both.
The girl on the green screen in the Thin Lizzy video is too out of focus and never once do the guys let her take center stage. She may as well be a lava background. Maybe she’s the one that tells Phil she’d do anything for him because he’s a rocker?
I think you’ve pegged the roots of that move, although in Lynott’s case you’ve got to wonder if it was a means to relieve Batwing Syndrome.
For the record, I have no earthly idea what e. pluribus gergley’s much vaunted and highly prized “animality” term means. But I know it when I see it, and that Thin Lizzy clip has “animality” in spades!
Jack White is a filmic version of Tarantino. They both assemble older styles and give them a modern polish. I’m not huge on either, since re-boots rarely match the source material. But I prefer Tarantino’s work to White’s because I love spaghetti westerns.
WTF ….are you high?
Is there a life size statue of Jack White honoring his status as a national treasure and beloved musical son?
But anyway …both videos here could be considered as having “trendy/cool” points really but the context of comparison is pretty weak.
You have a kind of mediocre Thin Lizzy song with a video that you can make on an iPhone these days. I would even bet that an iPhone has better resolution than the professional in-house studio cameras from 1973. Then you have a video that cost probably $10,000, made by an art student and adopted by Jack White as an “official” video.
You could just throw a Vampire Weekend track over the Thin Lizzy video and convince people that it was a new video done by hipster assholes ironically mimicking a video from the 70’s.
I vote to disqualify this question.
Wow, that’s a good comparison, although I can’t stand Tarantino yet hold out hope that one day I will fully embrace something by Jack White.
Now you funny too! Good stuff, no joke!
Here’s Jack White’s 70’s inspiration…
“Likely/proven rock “influence””
Probably more contemporaries than influences but he new Rolling Stone has a big article on KISS and in it Paul Stanley professes his love hook filled music and specifically cites the Raspberries, Big Star and the Small Faces as examples. I did not really see that coming. And now that I’ve had a chance to mull it over, it makes more sense to me (at least for the Raspberries and Big Star) than it did at first blush.