‘600 Horses‘ is a music video that will surely please rap amateurs as well as experimental film moviegoers. Dante Rapper’s music, whose lyrics take on many elements from the sphere of the underground universe, becomes with the help of director Arya Ardavan a slightly hypnotic experiment, without avoiding some moments of piercing aggression. Strident colours, lascivious movements, high-tech. And a femme fatale. All this against the backdrop of an imminent dystopia that starts from Ted Kaczynski’s words recalling how technology will subjugate the entire humanity, reconfiguring the pre-established social structures. Starting from such a premise, the message of the song can receive various inflections for listeners, despite its appearances that do not depart from the slightly vulgar style of other musical projects of this genre illustrating in a more or less ironic key the appetite for luxury, money, sex or any kind of pleasures of mercantilism-dominated communities.
Thus, even if it is not based on a very explicit narrative formula, this music video can be seen both as another incursion into the hedonistic existence of a consumerist world and as a form of sarcasm concerning the individuals so preoccupied with the delights of the flesh, that gradually they become elementary Pavlovian mechanisms dominated only by instincts, in order to ultimately be completely assimilated by the artificial intelligence. Only by adopting such an explanation, the sequence in which the female character tortures her victim with a used tampon is justified at the level of the whole project as if the only form of people to react against the general brainwashing process caused by lust and technological excess is the aggressive exposure of our own body’s misery itself.
Arya Ardavan and Dante Rapper’s music video attacks several contrasts that oppose the nonchalance of the lyrics with some sequences depicting dehumanizing fetishes, the strident chromaticity with the fluidity of the female character’s feline movements, the smiley faces with the erotic fantasies that push the BDSM practices to another level. The “cinematic” vision of Dante Rapper & Arya Ardavan feeds not only from the fetishist-technologized imagery of contemporary times, but also from the narrative structures of some light science-fiction parables that speak of a larval humanity dominated by thirst for power and sexual ecstasy. Far from being a project for puritans, ‘600 Horses’ is a video that depicts using the rap music instruments a brief insight into the backstage of an instinctual world in continuous dehumanization for which mercantilism and carnal pleasures have become supreme values.
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