Yesterday was the last day to buy Alex Day's song, "Stupid Stupid." As I mentioned in a previous post, Day "is influenced by media all around him but... has created his own sound and has refused to be bought up by any record label. And fans have responded, bringing him to number four in the UK Christmas charts last year."
Well, he's tried it again. But what interests me is not so much the song or even the attempt to get into the charts, but the video in which he introduces the latest song. The video is a series of repetitions, uses of wit and humor, and employments of gestalt. But beneath all that lies an important message, that he wants to transcend the culture of pigeonholing people based on the material goods they consume and instead deliver goods on the premise that people support him as loyal fans no matter what but only support him economically if they like his work.
He uses repetition throughout the video, particularly in the introduction when he repeatedly warns the audience to "always be clean" and throughout the video when he uses the word "stupid" an uncommonly tremendous amount of times. The reason for the use of "always be clean" will be discussed later on in this post, so for now let's concentrate on the myriad mentions of the word "stupid." Now why would someone just releasing a song called "Stupid Stupid" use the word so many times in a video? Beats me. Maybe he just likes the word. Or perhaps he hoped the word would take over our brains, nay, our very souls, and then they would be ready for possession by the song once he released it. Anyway, it was interesting to see the number of repetitions of the word he used to achieve whatever end he wished to achieve. (The average was around one use of the word every sixteen seconds, although, interestingly enough, mentions of the word were often concentrated in certain areas of the video.)
Now we get to the wit and humor, which Alex always has fun with. His use of sarcasm in his repetition of "always be clean" is one such example. Day may be literally clean, but a glance at many of his videos will reveal innuendo-ridden, somehow-not-flagged content that manages to seem charming yet immature at the same time. And by repeating this phrase he emphasizes it and cements the audience's idea of him as a witty and immature person. He also uses wit and humor in his description of his project, talking about his own hypocrisy in logic about the charts. When he talks about his success last year and his assertion this last summer that it no longer mattered, and then his sudden change of mind this winter, we are left with the undeniable irony and cognitive dissonance, and this helps us to remember Day and his cause.
But in order to really get viewers thinking about Stupid Stupid, Day uses gestalt. This can be seen in the beginning of the video, in which he performs a brief, jump-cut-filled tutorial on the basics of scrambling eggs, then announces that he will be announcing a "Christmas project," then looks at the last month of his Cliff Richard calendar before finally explaining his project. The quick jump-cuts and choppy lines of the "recipe for six eggs" create a rhythm in the viewer's head that, when broken, has a powerful effect on the viewer's perception of the video. It now seems strange and interesting, exactly as Day has planned.
And by starting with a topic that has nothing to do with the one he wants to discuss, he furthers this perception of strangeness and builds the suspense and the viewer's curiosity. He cements this feeling with the introduction of the Cliff calendar directly after he says he will announce the Christmas project. Instead of launching directly into the pitch, he makes the audience wait, and this brings the tension higher than the other two methods combined. By adjusting lines, editing, and content, Day causes the viewer to feel odd, and therefore to pay more attention to his pitch.
But even as he employs such mainstream techniques, Day attempts something truly admirable. He makes very clear that, despite his shameless plugs of all of his music, he does not want personal fame, only the ability to spread his music so that all the people who could potentially like it have the option of hearing it. And it is this sentiment that sold me to this song, not any of his advertising techniques.
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