There’s a new video on YouTube, that I’ve watched a lot. Apparently Tom Jones and the British band The Cardigans have a hit with the old Talking Heads song Burnin' Down the House. To my mind the best version of that song is found in the great concert movie, Stop Making Sense, by Jonathan Demme. It includes what I consider the definitive version of Burnin' Down the House.
The video is staged as a kind of confrontation between Tom Jones and the Cardigans. I don’t think it’s wrong to see it that way. Tom Jones may well represent the old guard. He seems to want sexually the Cardigans’s lead singer, a pretty blonde named Nina Persson, though she is probably young enough to be his great-granddaughter. He is very animated, moves his arms, legs, and mouth extremely, though his looks are probably enhanced by surgery and dye (He’s in his 80s, I saw on Wikipedia. In the video he looks around 50).
But Ms. Persson, whom he seems to be confronting, is the opposite of animated, whatever that is. She moves as little as possible. Thus her (and the band’s) confrontation with Tom Jones, is as different as two approaches can be, even though the song is very little changed from its original version. In fact it sounds kind of the same as the David Byrne version.
I think the reason the video is fascinating to me is that it represents a confrontation of generations, no matter what the representers of the generations think.
Ms. Persson is clearly in dialogue with Mr. Jones. His animation is matched at every turn by her minimalism. Her movements are subtle, doing just what she has to do, in answer to Mr. Jones, whose movements are not at all subtle. And although the song is as little changed as possible from the old hit, she discovers in the song, to my surprise, a feminist anthem, without changing it very much.
But that’s the whole idea.
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