Music is not just a state of mind. The music that really strikes you is, in fact, a message that transcends personal tastes or prejudices. The music video ‘Renton‘, signed by directors Ximena Garrigues and Sergio Moya, based on Dj Moderno’s song, has what we might call a militant stake. But this militancy doesn’t reach an elitist political area, while this video is far from addressing a niche of “pretentious” listeners. In fact, the entire creative team of this project tries to convey the outrageous cry of a marginal community in their struggle to assert their own identity. It is difficult to say who these outcasts are, just as many viewers can see in this term another way of defining our very daily existence. More specifically, under the pretext of an act of rebellion apparently devoid of direct addressability, the creators of this video illustrate the universal status of the contemporary human whose life is governed by a series of aberrant rules imposed by society.
Without tackling the principles of a narrative video that explores through a concrete action a well-defined social universe, this project renders in a compressed way a metaphorical act of emancipation. The literary and cinematic references that evoke, for example, the fictional universes created by Irvine Welsh and Quentin Tarantino become a leitmotif of this form of ostentatious liberation. This leitmotif functions, on the one hand, as a way of expressing the contrasts between external normativity and the individual status of the marginalized, and, on the other hand, as a means of fixing in a precise space this detonation of electropop energy. Thus, Ximena Garrigues and Sergio Moya opt for a relatively linear cinematic style that cuts from a peripheral urban landscape quasi-industrial architectural elements invaded by graffiti. This space of riot par excellence hosts short “episodes” of frontal revolt or choreographic moments that culminate in a metaphorical gesture – smashing a toilet bowl – which actually reflects the entire misery or social hypocrisy. Indeed, perhaps this solution, although suggestive enough, is not necessarily the most original way to define an act of extreme rebellion. And yet ‘Renton’ is a project that manages, despite its subtextual violence or its predictability, to offer you an invigorating experience and to contaminate you with its frantic energy.
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