This week, Dear Television wrote about music videos, and I turned in a #longread post on all three of Arcade Fire’s music videos for their single, “Afterlife.”

“This video is good because Gerwig is dancing to the song. Part of what makes the [Black Orpheus] lyric video so uncanny and ultimately uncomfortable is that the dancers in the video cannot possibly be dancing to Arcade Fire. On a visceral level, the appropriation of their spontaneous, impassioned movements feels almost more invasive than the appropriation of their skin color or ‘exoticism.’ The lyric video commits a low-grade historical fraud by forcing its subjects to dance to ‘Afterlife,’ a song that is really only modestly, theoretically even, danceable.”

“Three Ways of Looking at Arcade Fire”