In case anyone was looking for a song to dance to when the next inevitable volcano eruption ensues, Caroline Polachek has you covered with “Smoke,” the fifth video to hatch from her Desire, I Want to Turn Into You album. Like two of her other music videos from this album cycle, “Sunset” and “Welcome to My Island,” the overall aesthetic and editing techniques are designed to look similarly “DIY,” or, as Polachek put it, “I just wanted to make a classic shoegaze video without having to do the music part.” Which she already loosely did with both of the aforementioned videos. And it was also in “Welcome to My Island” that a volcano plays a central role as one of the backdrops while “lava” bursts forth from Polachek’s own mouth. Perhaps the volcano metaphor in relationships is just too good to pass up a second time in “Smoke.”
Visually lush and sumptuous in a different way than “Billions,” Polachek evokes, in many ways, the Andy Warhol painting of Mount Vesuvius entitled, what else, “Vesuvius.” This done with a volcano “structure” that looks as though it was crafted of, let’s call it, “theater cloth” as she does her dance in front of it. Almost as though using her witchy arm movements to attempt conjuring the lava to come out and play. She then opens with the assurance, “It’s just smoke/Floating over the volcano/It’s just smoke/Go on, you know I can’t say no/It’s just smoke.” Ignoring the fact that, in this case, where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be scalding lava.
Such an allusion to relationship difficulties mirrors the same tactic Taylor Swift uses on Lover’s “Afterglow” with an “explosion metaphor,” including, “Chemistry ’til it blows up, ’til there’s no us” and “I’m the one who burned us down/But it’s not what I meant/I’m sorry that I hurt you…/I need to say, hey, it’s all me, just don’t go/Meet me in the afterglow.” But, as Pompeiians weren’t able to attest, there is no such thing as an “afterglow” to meet in once the eruption has ceased.
As Polachek’s band is silhouetted and superimposed over her own interpretive dance homages to the volcano, she declares in earnest, “And you are the big answer tonight/And you are melting everything about me/Oh, don’t worry about me, it’s just—” That unspoken cutoff being, you guessed it, “smoke.” Warming to the dangers of a “smoky” lover, Polachek is inspired to take her interpretive arm gestures to the next level as a disjointed shadow pair of her arms moves in front of her body as Peter Pan’s shadow might. Matt Copson, the director of the video (as well as Polachek’s boyfriend) then cuts to a close-up image on Polachek’s face (bedecked in her signature eye makeup style…that feels like a riff on Amy Winehouse meets Cleopatra) with the theater cloth volcano in the background—ever-looming, ever-beckoning. If desire is what Polachek wants to turn into, diving in headfirst to the volcano of love is a good start. Ignoring the smoke a.k.a. the ultimate sign of an inevitable eruption. Of course, on the positive side of figurative language, that could also mean an imminent orgasm as much as imminent disaster.
When the series of chanted “na-na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na-na-das” reaches a crescendo at the end of the song, Polachek—letting out a complementing “war cry,” of sorts—is shown on her knees looking skyward from an overhead angle at the center of a lava-red spiral. Letting loose more than ever with her theatrical dance stylings, smoke circles all around her, enveloping her. It certainly goes against all those fire safety videos people were shown in school about how to keep smoke from entering your lungs. But Polachek is committed to the perilous cause of love, announcing of the ash and smoke, “The fallout doesn’t faze me.”
That much is clearly true if this calm, tranquil visual of Polachek daring the volcano to erupt as she inhales its smoke is any indication. And, as climate change increasingly becomes “the name of the game” in the “20s,” it’s some “comfort” to know there’s a ditty to turn to should one find themselves amid an irascible volcano. Surely, the Pompeiians would’ve appreciated if this song could have played before the big lava smackdown came to wipe them out.
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