Can I take a seat?
Frankly, I could use your company now
- Sleeveless by LUWTEN
Window seat
Don’t want nobody next to me
I just want a chance to fly
A chance to cry
- Window Seat by Erykah Badu
The music video for Erykah Badu’s Window Seat ends with an assassination: “…Badu’s bare stroll is cut short by a sudden gun shot that appears to kill her instantly” writes Simon Vozick-Levinson in his article “Erykah Badu’s new ‘Window Seat’ video stirs controversy: Is the JFK imagery offensive?”
The way the “Sleeveless” music video begins is rather similar to the “Window Seat” video ending. LUWTEN’s singer ricochets back and forth, to the rhythm of the four opening shots…I mean, beats. Then she implores us with jazzy, soulful vocals:
Don’t call the police
I know it must be strange
To be seeing me there
It must have been strange seeing Erykah Badu walking near the famous grassy knoll, shedding her clothes. “Indecent exposure” is a crime and it’s quite possible that someone who saw her slowly stripping must have thought of calling the police. Erykah Badu explained in a video that: “the nudity I think scares the nation as a whole or people in the world as a whole because we are taught nudity is bad. But what I learned is that when it was packaged the way I was with no high heel shoes or long hair or spinning around a pole…people have a hard time processing it when it’s not packaged for the consumption of male entertainment. So they don’t know quite what to do with it or how to place or or what to say.” (Window Seat: Erykah Badu’s explanation” by Kalinda Productions, 2011)
Sleeveless is “about letting go. You’ll literally see singer Tessa Douwstra wearing a large knitted sweater, that is getting unravelled - she’s getting Sleeveless.”
“The unravelling of a band? And then there were two?” asks Lars Ulrich, drummer of Metallica, in one of my favourite rockumentaries “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster”.
In a Psychology Today article by Hara Estroff Marano titled “Rock Around the Doc: Metallica in Therapy”, the more laid back member of Metallica, Kirk Hammett, revealed that: “along the way I got seduced by the mythology of being a rock star…I was a victim of that myth of being in a rock band for 15, 18, 20 years and having any sort of behaviour instantly justifiable….It became really empty. It was hurting my relationship with my wife. I got into a vicious cycle of wanting to medicate with more booze and drugs.” When Kirk stopped doing the destructive activities “ a lot of the depression went away. The therapy helped me see clearly why these things were happening to me.”
Look for an unlocked door
‘Cause there’s something I need to
Talk about
Just hear me out
- Sleeveless by LUWTEN
Erykah Badu explained that metamorphosis can be scary: “peeling back layers of things we have learned and separating ourselves from the group is also horrifying because we are afraid of being ostracized and assassinated by the group, if we have our own thoughts and our own mind and our own will and our own direction…Groupthink is actually the term I was protesting.”
O, presently I’m standing
Here right now
You’re so demanding
Tell me what you want from me
- “Window Seat” by Erykah Badu
Therapeia, directed by M.Q. Powell, begins with the main character standing by a window in her therapist’s office. “Clara Jordan (Marquita Goings), a smart, witty and beautiful business woman is faced with the challenge of her life; Her perfect storm marriage. In the quest to save her marriage with her hard working and ambitious husband, Bobby Jordan (Devin Robinson X), they seek out therapy to confront the very root of their never ending issue.”
James Hetfield, frontman of Metallica admitted that: “There’s still a part of me that doesn’t want to give away our innermost fears - our big fear of intimacy. I still struggle with this every day. But I know this has the potential to help other bands and other people to just blow away that mystique of the rock idol who leads the perfect life.”
Watch "Sleeveless" by LUWTEN: