VIDEO VAULT THURSDAY!
(because exclamation points make all the difference)

AND THEY REALLY DO MAKE THE DIFFERENCE ALONG WITH WRITING A SENTENCE ALL IN UPPERCASE!

So, if you’re not looking at the videos posted each week in Video Vault Thursdays! The question is why not?!?!

This week, we are taking a trip back to 1993, how can it be that 1993 is fifteen years gone!? Where does the time go, all too fast as the days pass, I’ll say!

...the song was inspired by “Camille’s vaginal flower theory,” most likely referring to the American social critic Camille Paglia, of whom he was a fan. In Paglia’s 1990 book Sexual Personae, she explores the prevalence of female genitals being perceived as wounds — often manifesting in diseased flower imagery — in psychoanalytic literature. She cites the ailing flower in William Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” the “poisonous genital flowers” in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours, and a description by Tennessee Williams comparing a vagina to “a dyin’ orchid.”

This is a video that stands out because of both the song and the imagery it is married to. While the song is a great piece of music, the video undoubtedly had a hand in popularizing it the song even further. It’s an instance where the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. The director, Anton Corbijin is no small part of that feat:

Corbijn tends to eschew traditional glamour photography, instead favoring a rawer look, often in black-and-white. His subjects appear to be calm and far removed from everyday life. His photographs show raw emotion. His influential style of black and white imagery with stark contrasts on grainy film (sometimes referred to as “overcooked”) has been imitated and copied in such extent that it has become a rock cliché and a vital part of the visual language in the 1990s