Sunday, February 19, 2012

Henric de la Cour: Electronic Odes to Voguing

I fucking love this video.


I normally get bored quickly with videos that have a band standing there performing and little to nothing else. I have watched this a few times and every time it draws me in completely with the haunting song mixed with the visuals. It's pretty hard to pull off looking this melancholy and tortured in black lipstick and white make up without making me laugh to be honest, but they've done it swimmingly.

What really attracted me to this video was the person voguing throughout by Frederick Quinones. I have never seen anything that is such a unique tribute to the underground Harlem drag ball scene in darker electronic music. While I loved seeing Madonna's recent half time show turn the bro-tastic superbowl into a queer voguing extravaganza, it is also nice to see these things in the darker, less mainstream forms of music. I also appreciate the celebrations of male femininity and gender diversity in Henric de la Cour's performances and videos in general. For more history on this stuff, see Paris is Burning. It's a great documentary and has a lot of insight into this underground world and what participants faced in their day to day life during this time in terms of racism, homophobia, cis sexism, and so on.

Also, he has a cool neubauten tattoo on his right arm. Swoon.

Question for readers: Why don't people like this guy? All of his videos have a large portion of dislikes. Is it a homophobia thing or did he do something to piss off fans of these genres?

5 comments:

  1. With regards to dislikes, might it have something to do with his transition from alt. rock to more synth based music? From what I understand the previous projects he was involved in (Yvonne and Strip Music) were a pretty big deal in Sweden, maybe there are some fans who feel betrayed by him doing something different?

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    1. Just a theory, I couldn't say for certain. Still, I do really love Henric's music! :)

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  2. I've never heard of him before, but he sounds like Placebo would have if they were an 80's band. I can't say I like it, but I wouldn't bother hitting the thumbs down either.

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