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Music

Tame Impala’s New Music Video Is a Surreal Sex Fantasia

Take a psychosexual romp through a pop surrealist mindscape in directing team CANADA’s latest, for the song "The Less I Know The Better."
Screencaps via

Think back to your teenage sexual fantasies. If you can remember any, they were probably a rotating series of the mundane and the psychosexually surreal, where erotic yearning collided with a personality just starting to form around its new interests.

This is what CANADA, the team behind the hip erotica of El Guincho’s hip “Bombay” video, delivers for Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know The Better.” Their latest isn’t as gloriously exhibitionist as “Bombay.” Instead, this short film has a narrative, an erotic fantasia that plays out inside the minds of its two characters—a teenage basketball player and a cheerleader.

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It starts unassumingly enough, with the guy running suicide sprints and the girl looking longingly at him, but things quickly descend into the surreal and erotic as the camera dollies inside a very, very long gym locker, which opens to reveal the girl with her legs open over a locker room bench, and the boy's head between them. What follows, then, is a cinematic panoply featuring an acrobatic gorilla, dance numbers, blood, “Take On Me”-style animation, and a female body covered in multicolored paint, amongst other things.

The video would be mere titillation (and jailbait-y titillation at that) if not for the cheeky nostalgia at play, which should make viewers recall the many-splendored possibilities of sexual awakening presented to their now vanished teenage brains. A time when everything was fresh and new, and you were several years away from running headlong into the dark void of domestic relationships. So it’s a sweet homage to those near or distant days of new love, which fits the hopeful yet melancholic vibe Tame Impala lays down in “The Less I Know The Better.”

TAME IMPALA 'The Less I Know The Better' from CANADA on Vimeo.

"The Less I Know The Better" is off Tame Impala's 2015 Currents (Interscope Records, Modular Recordings). Click here to see more of CANADA’s work.

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