Analysis by Anthony F. Janson

The video for ‘It’s About the House’ is a hyper-modernist example of an artist, Dances With White Girls (DWWG), using multiple versions of a single song to accompany equally deconstructed visuals.

In the opening sequence, Jean-Luc Godard’s rare film ‘Notre Musique’ is invoked as a flashback vignette of a fan realizing that the obsession that gave her life meaning is what led her to question her own existence in the end.

In the second part, the video within a video section, an ordinary gathering of friends is spread out before us like a flat Guernica. Here, in an obvious reference to George Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’, a house party dissolves into an empty room with two naked girls breaking eggs on each other. The starkness of the scene with 4 walls, 2 girls and eggs is in-vocative of a dream, as if to depict the creative process and the subconscious elements that go into it. The repeated single note playing on the keyboard is a statement about how easy it is to create music in modern times.

After the title card blacks out letters, it is revealed that the house metaphor is a stand-in for ‘us’, and that this song is a call for everyone to remember what is truly important: communion with your fellow man. This last section shows us that even while we are absorbed in our personal dramas we are all still connected. A girl undresses only to put on a new face, unaware that it isn’t much different from her old one. A girl in red sleepwalks through life until as a final gesture, the artist (DWWG) knocks on a window and wakes her from self-absorption. She is realigned to music, naked and free.

Finally, the artist (DWWG) explains in a voice-over that he is no prophet and that he has his ups and downs like everyone else (further illustrated by the expensive Lanvin sunglasses crudely held together with scotch tape), but whatever the case may be, he never forgets that the real meaning of life lies in the connections we make.

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