We’ve seen dance routines choreographed around smartphones in music videos, and we’ve seen FaceTime deployed in music videos, and we’ve sure as heck seen Beats product placement in music videos — but have we ever seen all three in one shockingly digestible piece of earnest commercialism?
Major Lazer’s Run Up video is all about the modern dilemma of texting while grinding
Is it polite to send texts from someone else’s butt?
Is it polite to send texts from someone else’s butt?
Major Lazer’s “Run Up” video features rapper PartyNextDoor wandering through a house party where beautiful, joyful youths are enjoying each other’s company with their iPhones out, recording every moment. Making out with a stranger? Recording. Dancing with some gal pals? Recording. Jumping into the pool? Well, the iPhone 7 is water-resistant.
Grinding? You can still send a text, with the aid of a convenient butt-shaped wrist rest. It’s the “butt text,” redefined for the age of lock screens.
This video is meant to be ridiculous, and any piece of artwork that finagles this hard to get 30 different iPhones and a dozen iPhone features front and center is inarguably ridiculous.
But forgive me — it’s also a lot more fun than yet another dark, “biting” critique of smartphone culture, wherein the takeaway is consistently something preachy about narcissism and deadened nerves. These people are active, functioning, interacting, and boasting incredible hand-eye coordination. Their phones are props, used in an aesthetically interesting way to make the song and dance more dynamic. That’s good entertainment, and it seems like a fun party!
For what’s basically an Apple ad, you could do a lot worse.
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