Advertising Space

I am going to write something about each song I've got on my IPod. I'll devote a post per song and I'll write about them in the alphabetical order they are on my IPod. Important to note is that I'll write very little about their musical qualities, because quite simply I don't know much about music. I can't read a single note, and I even often don't know exactly what instrument is playing. Instead I'll write more their narrative qualities. Because, despite the fact that we usually like songs, because of their melody or the singing of the artist, songs do have texts and we can't ignore these texts. I'll also analyze the video clips of the songs.

-Advertising Space (Robbie Williams, 2005) Williams is a little bit underrated. He has never made a really classic song, but he's also never made a bad one. You always know what you get with him. This is his best song. It's got a pretty interesting, but a bit vague text. It seems to be about Elvis Presley and how soon we forget even the best artists after they die. Maybe we'll get wiser by analysing the video.



We start of by seeing a pretty ordinary guy playing om his guitar in his bedroom intercut of him walking anxiously around his room. After a while we realize that the shots of him walking through the room happen chronologically after him playing relaxed on his guitar. And we realize that he is preparing for something. We have a hunch of what it is, but don't know for sure yet. Interesting to note is that his bathroom wall is full of pictures of naked women that are a bit more erotic then one usually sees on boy's/men's walls and are almost pornographic. Important to note is also that while he is first clothed in white and played a pink guitar, he now is clothed in black. We see him transformed into Elvis Presley and the lightning in the scene is just like the lightning we see when godlike heroes are presented in film.

We are now 1:57 into the video and we can look a bit into the meaning in the video. Due to the contrast of there clothes we realize that white Williams and black Williams have two different personalities. White Williams is a timid good guy that plays on his guitar and dreams of one day being a rockstar. When he dresses himself like Elvis he unleashes his inner rock star and becomes a little bit of a bad guy. In other words if you follow the footsteps of Elvis you might one day become a rock star even if you are just a timid guy. But you can't never reach to Elvis' heights. He is like a God of music. You can only admire him, perhaps even sexually. (The pink guitar in combination with the pictures might be a hint that our rock star has homosexual feelings for Elvis.)

Next we see him in a bus going somewhere again intercut with pictures from him in his house. But we see that there is more weirdness going on. At home he opens his closet and there is a huge doll inside by the name of Cylla, which he adores and sings to. We realize that the doll is probably the object of his fetish. Later in time he goes down a glamorous street to give a concert as an Elvis impersonator in a bar. The bar is pretty empty though and no one really seems to care. He leaves and the lights go out. In a pretty brilliant shot at the end the lightning on the doll changes too and the doll now eerily looks like Michael Jackson, after which we end with a cut to Robbie Williams.

Well we can get a lot out of this. First of all the unsuccessful concert. It can have two meanings. First of all it seems to say, no matter how glamorous you are or how much you try to look like Elvis there is only one Elvis and you just can't ever reach his heights. Secondly it might accuse the people of not caring at all about great artists like Elvis anymore. In the restaurant nobody gives a damn that someone is impersonating Elvis, not even in a negative way.
The line 'no one learned from your mistakes' is obviously addressed in this last part of the video I think. Elvis was on drugs and even though that messed him up horribly and eventually caused his death, it didn't serve as a cautionary tale for other pop/rock stars. And obviously Michael Jackson is one of the artists who couldn't resist the pressures of fame. And neither did Robbie Williams himself. Obviously Robbie Williams' character in this video is crazy too. But he is not a rock star yet. Perhaps Williams wants to say that you have to be a bit crazy to be a great rock star and that maybe the craziness of artists like Elvis and Jackson and himself wasn't caused by their fame, but their craziness caused their fame.