Although Eusexua has only freshly been unleashed as of January 24th, FKA Twigs is already presenting her listeners with the fourth single, “Striptease.” A song in which Twigs asks us not only to “breathe in [her] insides,” but also to do just this: “Watch me flow/Lost in my striptease.” Something that audiences had no problem doing when it came to taking in 2019’s “cellophane” video (the lead single from Magdalene), directed by Andrew Thomas Huang.
Compared to her previous singles from what marks her third album, “Eusexua,” “Perfect Stranger” and “Drums of Death,” “Striptease” is the most confrontational—a song that dares to get gritty and raw in its explorations, both lyrically and sonically. Not to say that her other Eusexua singles don’t, it’s just that, out of all four, “Striptease” is the least likely to achieve the status of being a “hit.” Complete with Twigs once again making up her own hybrid word in the form of “titalise” (or “titalize” for the Americans). An ostensible mashup of “titillate” and “tantalize” as she sings, “Arch my spine/And just a shoulder, titalises on me/I ride/You wanna read my every line and I don’t mind.”
Everything about such lyrics bears the suggestive note of a striptease—only instead of flesh, what Twigs seeks to unveil to her audience is the very core of who she is inside (to repeat, “Breathe in my insides”). Ergo such riffs on a “nudie show” as, “My sternum stretched wide/Opening me feels like a striptease/Silk for my tears and lace for my fears/I’m stripping my heart till my pain disappears.” Inside a traffic-filled tunnel in Paris, that’s precisely what Twigs aims to do as she runs through it in a frenzied, terrified hurry at the outset of the Jordan Hemingway-directed video. To be sure, something about it mimics the opening to just about every horror movie (a pointed stylistic choice since, honestly, what’s scarier than self-examination?).
She ends up running down the center divide as a carload of Frenchmen honks at her, prompting her to scream “Fuck you!” (it almost gives John Bender’s “fuck you!” in The Breakfast Club a run for its money). Her fur-trim coat nearly off her shoulders due to all this body jostling, Twigs slows her run into what looks more like a drunken walk, eventually letting the coat fall off entirely to reveal a skimpy red dress. And as more cars start to pass by her on either side, Twigs proceeds to dance as though she’s on a stage at a strip club (even throwing in a dash of vogueing arm movements in for good measure). Eventually, this leads to her actually disrobing (as it turns out, the dress is more of a wrap that can be slowly “unpeeled” from her body) as she evidently achieves a state of eusexua. Why else would she suddenly start levitating above a car as the man driving it gazes up at her in awe?
For a brief moment, it even appears as though Twigs is underwater, only for Hemingway to cut back into the tunnel as the lyrics, “I’m borderline, it’s getting late/I feel alive, I wanna show you/I-I-I-I-I I’ve got a birthmark on my mind/I think you’ll like it,” play in the background. Growing increasingly reckless with her dance moves, the passing cars are ever more at risk of mowing her down. Though, of course, they would never really dare to interrupt someone experiencing such blatant eusexua. Granted, there is an instant when Twigs does capitulate to moving out of the way of a giant transport truck. Perhaps allowing herself to live another night of tunnel-stripping-induced eusexua.
At around the three-minute-fifty-six-second mark of the video, things start to get real Lynchian when Twigs appears as though cut out of thin air in a kaleidoscopic presentation that only shows her head and part of her torso (with occasional glimpses of her stripper heel-bedecked legs). Twigs then delivers a series of guttural moan-screams that might have even given Dolores O’Riordan some competition. Exchanging a knowing look with a child in another one of the cars passing by, Twigs at last seems to “transcend” into the being who (or what) she was truly meant to be, her hair and ensemble entirely altered at the end of “Striptease” to that of a fashion model walking a runway (something Twigs isn’t a stranger to doing).
Now free from the tunnel (and the dark place it took her to), Twigs walks quite literally into the lights of the flashbulbs at the end of it (in a scene that mirrors the “Eusexua” lyrics, “I was on the edge of something greater than before/But nobody told me”). Presumably coming out the other side more enlightened. More “herself.” Indeed, as she captioned a clip of the video, “Jordan I love you, you captured me.” And in doing so, Hemingway has further assisted Twigs in capturing the hearts of her listeners with a song “conceived in the Vantablack of night out of passion, love and trust.”
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