I was having a not-so-good day at work today, but I came across this video that cheered me up.
But first do you remember the girl pictured below?

Yup, that’s Robyn from the late 1990’s. The good old years when I was still a pimply school kid. The music world was so different back then, what I would consider the dark ages. Pop music was unashamedly saccharine sweet with boybands and girl bands popping out of no where, just like my pimples. Backstreet Boys, N Sync, Britney and Christina were the order of the day. No one listened to hip hop, and Linkin Park was only just reintroducing rock back into mainstream radio (although it has once again mysteriously evaporated out of the radio)

Now Robyn was discovered at a tender age of 13 and subsequently got a single released, the ubiquitously aired radio hit, “Show me love”. The song’s melody and lyrics were sweet, her voice was sweet, so were her innocent looks- what more could a screaming teeny bopper fangirl want? Thus Robyn joined the ranks of other international pop stars who rode on the wave of dull formulaic love songs, often accompanied by cheesy dance moves performed in synchrony by a group of people. Unfortunately, she isn’t the only sweet pop star in the metaphorical candy shop, so she eventually fell out of favour.

Fast forward about 8-9 years to the mid-noughties (2000’s). The pop scene is now quite different. Boybands have thankfully been swept off the face of the earth, although the odd attempts of comeback singles done by groups Backstreet Boys and Take That threaten to revert universal pop tastes back to the 1990’s. Female singers can’t even make a living without even displaying the slightest bit of attitude, case in point Gwen Stefani, Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse. This is the perfect time for the second coming of Robyn. And so she grew up into this-

It seems like her years in the music industry has morphed her into a pop star of the next level. Check out her image, her song titles, her lyrics- it looks like she left her 20th century pop sensibilities where it belonged, in the 20th century. In her quest to hold her own, she set up her own record label, Konichiwa Records and created a sound that was uniquely hers. Her pop music is strikingly modern and futuristic, through collaborations with visionary Swedish producers like the Knife and Klas Ahlund (the Swedish have a notorious reputation for being unforgivingly forward-looking in terms of creating pop music).

Some Malaysians would have had a taster of her music, via the single “Konichiwa Bitches” that was released early last year but only receiving Malaysian airplay early THIS year with an obviously tampered title, “Konichiwa B****es”. It has to be said, a known fact notwithstanding, that censorship takes the fun out of everything. While the song’s original refrain goes “Konichiwa, bitches!“, the censored version that goes “Konichiwa……” packs absolutely no punch at all.

Anyway, here’s the video that I wanted to share. It’s the remix version of another fantastic song by Robyn, called ‘Be Mine!’. The video of the original song is in itself already an amusing watch, what with Robyn clad in post-modern stylings paired up with a pre-pubescent kid of African descent as her date. But the video for the remix version is also excellent, in addition to being a great stress reliever! You may be yawning around the first two minutes as they only show people doing things in slow motion, but be patient and enjoy the song. It’s in the middle of the song where you see each a boxing glove approaching in slow motion and eventually punching them in the face, rendering them almost unrecognisable, that’s where it’s at!
I just love how unsuspecting they were behaving before that, only to have their cheeks meeting an inevitable kapow!
If only the video makers punched the daylights out of celebrities, politicians or models instead of average joes and janes. It would be significantly more self-gratifying to see a bunch of people we love to hate being sucker punched, because I ended up feeling slightly sympathetic to the unsuspecting victims of the vid!

So, if you are having a bad day and someone pissed you off, just imagine THEIR face as one of those in the video, getting punched slowly by YOU. It worked for me