“Give me the landscape of the moon,” Wolfmother’s lead singer, Andrew Stockdale, probably said. “Yes, give me the landscape of the moon and then give me a couple different outfit options. Give me a full-body cape to wear, but also give me a stereotypical ‘cool hipster rock god’ outfit to wear as well so that I can still have the option of maybe getting laid.”
“We’ll work with the Star Wars hype that the world is still coasting on,” Stockdale said to his band. “Put the resident ‘hot girl’ in the video in something that the sci-fi nerds can masturbate to later. But let’s leave the viewer with an impression, however so small, that we understand and appreciate feminism. So make sure you give her a sword of some sort to emphasize that underlying ‘strong female role’ that we hope to emulate.”
And so the Princess Leia wannabe runs around the galaxy, lazily slashing into the sides of men in alligator masks. She is destroying them before she has to face the dark Galactic warlord who, armed with bushy goatee, looks like the opposite of a Sith lord. He looks like your neighbor down the street who waters his lawn too much.
It’s so wildly entertaining in its simplicity, and it’s so dumb that it has done something right. So the Aussie band is either secured tightly to the Earth, or they are far, far away on the moon of their minds. With this music video, they are either brilliant or insane.
With the inescapable notes of sexism and tinges of self-obsession aside, Wolfmother’s newest music video for “Victorious” off of their recent album Gypsy Caravan is an homage to the bad sci-fi movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. The music video’s director, Brother Willis, describes this tongue-in-cheek video as “a lost space movie” that is mysteriously found and popped into a VCR somewhere. It’s a groovy concept that manifests itself into an entertaining video.
But the greatest reveal of the Wolfmother video? You can’t hide a bad, Muse-wannabe song behind the strangeness of a music video.
