Music by Os Mutantes, visuals by ... ?

The 50's song you are most likely to hear in a bar or a gym is Jackie Wilson's 'Reet Petite', not because it's a wonderful song (which it is), but because Aardman Animations made a cool claymation filmclip for it in the 80's. Take away the claymation filmclip and it would be just another exuberant two minutes of joy that you'd need to venture into AM radio to hear.

Who knows how many awesome bands don't even enter our radars because they don't have the right video concept to complement their song and create their image?

With YouTube, the need for a song to have a filmclip leads to an odd phenomenon: fans making their own filmclips. Often these clips are just people sharing their attempts at a funny dance. But sometimes it's something really special - or at least bizarre.

For example, one Mister Bungle fan went to a lot of trouble to make a filmclip for "Pink Cigarette". The results are mixed, but his heart is clearly in the right place: Link. Another guy had a sort of a go at making a film-clip for one of the coolest rock songs ever recorded, Roxy Music's "Both Ends Burning". There's something inherently hypnotic about a husky guy with a microphone headset sort of pretending to drive a car: Link.

I'd like to share a few wonderful songs by the tropicalia band Os Mutantes, and, because they pre-date MTV, the only way to do that is to link to user-generated filmclips on YouTube.

"Baby"

This song is so beautiful and simple:



"Panis et Circenses"

Unique, dark, politically-charged Brazilian psychedelia. Kind of like a Portuguese-language "A Day In The Life", recorded under a military dictatorship.

User 'Junin' on songmeanings.com provides this translation of the lyrics:

I wanted to sing a song enlightened by the sun
I've left the clothes upon the flag poles in the air
I've the tigers and lions out in the backyard
But the people in the dinning room are busy at getting born and dying

I ordered a pure-steel bright dagger
To kill my love and I did
At 5 o'clock on the central avenue
But the people in the dinner room are busy at getting born and dying

I ordered them to plant dream leaves in the solar garden
The leaves know how to look for the sun
And the root look for, look for

But the people in the dining room
Those people in the dining room
But the people in the dining room
Are busy getting born and dying.

Finally, their best-known song over here, "A Minha Menina". Great fun. The clip here falls into the category of "people sharing their attempts at a funny dance". The previous two clips suited the tone of the songs pretty well, but this one's a bit flat... His dancing needs to be at least two orders of magnitude sillier to match the song.