So I just watched this with the sound off, listening to Old Man by Neil Young instead. Maybe it’s the song, maybe it’s the fact that it’s 6 am right now, but this somehow seems like the saddest and best video I have ever seen. There’s something about the looks on their faces. My first impulse was to mock these guys, for doing their sad little show in their sad little basement about mass market culture, talking about how much they love a box set and a band that was made to be loved, so surprise surprise. And the guy with the hat and the metallica t-shirt, and the question why are you alive is percolating in my head.
There’s something about how sincerely they love these objects, and how ultimately all love and all life is meaningless in the universal scale, but all love, even the love these guys in their basement have for the Led Zeppelin box set, which is so meaningless and yet also so great that they need to tell the world how they feel, is ultimately so important. This is not what you would expect a video showing the sum of all human meaning to look like, but I think, by way of implication, it does.
