Short Shots of Sound is a new series on the Sights and Sounds seeking the way music videos shock our mind, shoving us out of the safe spaces that we shield ourselves in. We will explore the deeper emotional threads of truly critically curious, artistic videos by stellar artists. Periodically check in for a new entry. 

We live under the illusion that freedom is a kingcraft of the world we carved inside ourselves, either by fearful necessity or a need to declare ‘Here, here the fuck is who I am.’ And we can convince ourselves that amor is just a trigger warning for heartache; because everything we traditionally know about it blares off its propensity to wave itself around like a pistol. So we spin in safety, our arms swords tending the tenacity of our ability to keep the world at bay.

But FKA Twigs sees it differently. The roads of rabid revulsion we dance upon to escape even temporary realness are dangerous. They are hurting us. They are perpetual, mitigated moments of violence we protect ourselves with  via their repetition. But, still, a second of shouting outside our shyness can make all the difference. Standing still feels revolutionary because we swirl in a radical sameness that prepares us for an explosive, destructive divergence that’s pirouetting just around the corner. Stasis is a launching point, it is not a destination. When we can rock side to side, when we can punch the walls that define us, contain us—all with rhythmic ease–it’s time for a body to enter us and explode our paradigms. Feel real, motherfucker.

Bodies in FKA Twigs’ video hone their agency until its a brooding bomb waiting to explode at the edges. These bodies are madness made human, not miserable: they exist to show the bombastic way human touch can bust open all the boundaries you set to keep the world a shot to the temple away. Intimacy, it flouts explanations, it gives fuck all about expected relationships that should define us.

Relationships that seek us out like air floating into the same jet stream, like disconnected shards of the same glass, leave us supple, strong enough to bend around sores and stabbings of the heart. These relationships are not sacrifices. They are dour spirits shooting themselves up with dynamism, people  who needlessly cut themselves by the blades of their own mind claiming carte blanche over their spirits by living on the cusp of how the words of another can show us what we want.

Still, no ownership of mind is ever traded. If the bodies in Tw-ache capitulated to the body heat of another, their world would be shrouded in a shallow sadness. This is a jedi tete-a-tete, this is synchronized seeking of full swing, full play freedom that comes only when laying one’s face against another’s and just breathing. Your breath isn’t the air that I breathe, it’s my lift off. Your mouth agape isn’t a way to swallow me alive, it’s pleasure in seeing me off to wherever, whomever I may go.

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