Marble Players - Let You Go directed by the LOL Boys
Another slice of Lol Boys culture – can it possibly live up to the ridiculously high standard set by previous videos?
The conclusion ends up being - no not really.
It contains none of the political excitement of 123 or Blockz and in the end Let You Go is something more like pure style. The magic of 123 and Blockz was the transformation of found, web based images into a coherent ideological agenda grounded in the values inherent in those same images. Whilst Let You Go certainly presents a program of sorts it can’t in any meaningful sense be described as ideological.
The central problem is seems is the music itself, not produced by the LOL Boys, which is has a straight up party house feel to it and lacks any of the invention and ambition of either 123 or Blockz. Let You Go is probably some kind of Daft Punk descendant and as such is associated with the more standard dynamic of the DJ playing to an audience, or a one to many paradigm. This is fine but it’s hardly revolutionary.
To be fair to Jerome of the LOL Boys he seems to have realized this when he made the Let You Go video and he does a good job of matching the tone of the music with the imagery. So there are sequences where the DJ, behind a bank a computers, plays to a real audience. This is a clever acknowledgement that the essence of music lays outside the computer and in the space of a real club. The flashing text ‘Superstar’ is a reference to the familiar and very real world characterization of the DJ as celebrity. The breakdancer watched by a stadium-sized crowd is a sort of humorous, internet influenced extension of the Superclub.
The video then is an attempt to reconcile the virtual and the non-virtual – to use the visual language of the web to express real world and established notions of club culture. This is interesting in itself and there is some smart and appealing interplay generated by this tension. However the representation of the real through the virtual leads, in the end, to a lack of expression where each side drains resonance from the other rather than amplify it. The effect is that the Let You Go video is surface, a procession of web images that lack the grounding of the web itself. So the synchronous dancing of avatars appears as a LOL Boys style marker rather than a musing on the logic of the network as it did in 123 and Blockz.
The feeling is that Jerome did well with what he was given but Let You Go lacks the vitality and forward thinking of the earlier videos. Clearly what’s required is a return to total LOL Boys production so the majesty and expressive potential of virtual world and dated web graphics can bloom once again.
