Music Video – Another Body

Many musicians on the independent scene today are casting off their clear-cut sexual identity to escape the cage of assigned male and female roles. The thematic compilation of video clips Music Video – Another Body is a testimony to this phenomenon: The band Antony & The Johnsons finds existential themes in transsexual and pangender stylisation; Hercules and Love Affair take up the story of the transsexual community associated with disco culture; Canadian feminist performer Peaches adopts the attributes of male strength and frenzied belligerence; Swedish siblings The Knife conceal their bodies in anonymity and perform in Lynchesque phantasmic masks, and an unusual love trilogy emerges in video clips by Björk (partnership between a woman and a tomcat), Animal Collective (a woman–demon love affair) and Scout Niblett (woman – death). These short films prove that, nowadays, music frequently encourages a broader aesthetic and social outlook which often (sometimes provocatively) breaks down the barrier between men and women, the living and the dead, and human and mythical beings.