Nicki Minaj: Damn You’s a Steamy Lass!
The year is 2012: WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE! Even if the Mayans aren’t right, according to many Steampunks the end of the Utopian Steampunk Universe is definitely being ushered in. The Four Horsemen we know and love (War, Famine, Death and depending who you ask either Plague or Conquest) have been replaced. The four harbingers of our Steampunk doom are apparently Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and now Dave Guetta and Nicki Minaj.
We’ve heard people gripe about Lady Gaga’s Steampunk-y headpiece from her “Alejandro” video and we’ve been confused by ‘Bieber Punk’ for the use of clockwork dancers and elaborate set pieces in his video for “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” off the soundtrack for the movie Arthur Christmas. Gaga’s video was scorned by Steampunks as being ‘not Steampunk,’ and the Bieb had the distinction of having a music video hodge-podge of images and sounds that didn’t make sense together. Arthur Christmas isn’t Steampunk so why is Justin Bieber slapping on a beautifully crafted Steampunk gauntlet and dancing with clockwork people to a trite and cookie cutter version of a classic Christmas song? Gaga’s was an interesting piece that Steampunks clung to while Bieber’s was the unfortunate product of throwing darts at a dart board made up of ‘guaranteed selling points.’
And now we have David “Damn You’s a Sexy Bitch,” Guetta and Nicki “Super Bass,” Minaj entering the fray with “Turn Me On.” So begins the “Pop music is the Death of Steampunk, why has popular culture taken my subculture, pop music helps get non-steampunks into the genre” argument that never ends.
Here’s the video.
Immediate Steampunk tropes; brown tones, burning furnace, crazy goggles, clock movements, CALLIGRAPHY! All in the first ten seconds of the video. Then it gets weird as a pair of white zippered lips starts singing over a bunch of clock movements. We’re led to believe (as disturbingly bright skin magically assimilates over the clockwork form like a hungry blob,) that the lips belong to the clockwork. If the clock movement and lips had been CG of the same caliber, or the lips and skin had been a live action effect it might not look so creepy, but the gearwork and CG skin grafting is a terrifying sight. By the time this form looks anything like a human it resembles the slimy, disgusting consistency of Futurama’s Dr. Zoidberg when he sheds his shell.
We then see Nicki Minaj walk through a dark, gas-lamp gothic, Victorian… place where a number of plastic/china-doll people look at her. At this point the plastic people charge at the door of the scientist who created Nicki Minaj looking to get naked upgrades to look more like Ms. Minaj. The scientist is a man made of chainmail for reasons I don’t know. Nicki Minaj does her signature Salt-N-Peppa-style rapping (For only about 4-5 lines, which I actually kind of respect, giving a nod to what people like about her without making it the focal point,) surrounded by Minaj-sized Ken dolls. She walks to a horse, gets on, and rides off into the sunset being pursued by the plastic ladies.
The video is strange and ridiculous but I give it a lot of credit, since it takes a visual aesthetic, an homage to mad science and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and sticks with it start to finish. The song is a pop song that is well done, it’s not going to be another “Like a Virgin,” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” or even another “Sexy Bitch,” but it has a catchy chorus and danceable music. So why apply a Steampunk aesthetic to a song that is no way indicative of a Steampunk sound? To answer it simply, money. Steampunk sells right now. We can hem and haw about how corporate America is latching onto our subculture and bleeding it dry but in all honesty unless you are KW Jeter, or read the April 1987 edition of Locus magazine you heard about Steampunk through some sort of mass marketing.
It is not HOW you learned about Steampunk that matters, it is what you DO with it. Of all the pop music trying to create a Steampunk aesthetic in their videos (with the exception of Panic! At The Disco who were always sort of fringe Steampunk, and Pop-Punk-Cabaret performers,) so far “Turn Me On,” has done it best. It does nothing to push the Steampunk genre forward, but at least it’s a cohesive artistic direction and the music, while not Steampunk, doesn’t detract from the visuals being shown on the screen (ridiculous as some of it may be).
