Tonight I feel bummed that I couldn’t go see Queens Of The Stone Age swing by Cirkus in Stockholm last Thursday on their tour to support the reissue of their eponymous debut album. Even though it would have been nice to hear this often forgotten but quintessential debut of the desert stoner rockers back to back, I still would’ve missed what is probably their two biggest hits: No One Knows and Go With The Flow. While I would argue that No One Knows is the better song the fact remains that Go With The Flow’s video is the one that pretty much redefined QOTSA’s artistic impression on their fans and won over loads of new ones. Me among the latter group.
In 2002, when Songs For The Deaf came out, I was first baffled by the angular groove of No One Knows. But it was the video to the 2003 single Go With The Flow that completely blew my mind. I was 11 at the time and I was mostly into what was popular in the mainstream at the time. My only real kink was electronic music, where I could stretch outside the mainstream box. In this song and in this video, Josh Homme had finally realized his vision of robot rock, years before Daft Punk popularized the non-existing term.
Maybe it’s the video game aesthetic feel of the video that got me hooked at the time. I’m still a sucker for graphic 3D animated stuff from the late 90′s and early 00′s. I wish to believe that it’s more than sheer nostalgia over what I grew up with. I like when things are clean, organized and packed with efficiency. The colour scheme of the video is reduced to black, white and red, connecting not only to the album’s cover art and fellow desert rockers in The White Stripes who were quickly gaining popularity at the time. The artistic statement couldn’t have been more obvious or potent: the colours of road madness through Cacti Country is red like passionate blood, black like dark dirt and white just for the sake of the disillusioning contrast. The band hammers their instruments furiously but repetitively like robots as to either make the listener sore or to spur on to the video’s literally orgasmic climax. It may sound dull and spiritless but Homme brings out the extra ingredient to seduce, or most possibly, drug the listener: the dramatic and pop-pretty but still relatively low-key and restrained melody.
The result is numbing rock, hypnotizing in its relentless drive forward, pleasing the high expectations of the stoner/hard rock fans and tying new fans to the hard to digest genre. It worked for a pretty un-rocking 11-yearold kid like me. The song and the video together is like a sexual fantasy in itself. Sexual innuendo galore. Sometimes I wonder how much this video actually ignited my sexual development in my pubertal tweens. All I could do was go with the flow…
Listen to Go With The Flow on Spotify!
And, most preferrably, watch the video!
