I Discovered The Knife Today
Ana posted a cool song with accompanying video, which prompted me to seek out more of The Knife. I watched a few, but when I hit this one above, “Pass This On,” I was floored. This is just about one of the best videos I’ve ever seen on YouTube, and I’ve seen a lot of videos. Two seconds shy of four minutes isn’t enough. Really. It’s gorgeous.
This video is the kind of moment that makes even pessimistic-me think Stephen Hawking needs more glimmers of hope in between his days when he claims in “Life in the Universe“, “… The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, is the time scale for accumulation of information. This used to be hundreds, or even thousands, of years. But now this time scale has shrunk to about 50 years, or less. On the other hand, the brains with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems …
We certainly can not continue, for long, with the exponential rate of growth of knowledge that we have had in the last three hundred years. An even greater limitation and danger for future generations, is that we still have the instincts, and in particular, the aggressive impulses, that we had in cave man days. Aggression, in the form of subjugating or killing other men, and taking their women and food, has had definite survival advantage, up to the present time. But now it could destroy the entire human race, and much of the rest of life on Earth. A nuclear war, is still the most immediate danger, but there are others, such as the release of a genetically engineered virus. Or the green house effect becoming unstable.”
Something about the people in that room above counteracts this certainty of our aggression, at least, for some … Here’s another version if you can’t get enough, though it doesn’t top the posted one.
Peace out.
~~
12 Responses to “I Discovered The Knife Today”
AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:16 am eExtraordinary audio production and quite the mood.
People can be entrained this way and that, for good and bad.
Sort of a tribal trance there. I’ve used the word ‘tribal’ for
brutal things, but here is a reminder that there is good tribal too,
the shared ‘flow’. The questions in the lyrics really add a nice
disarming touch to the mystery of it all, a shared vulnerability.
And it’s a plain setting.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:17 pm eAmazing–thank you.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:50 pm eYay! I know, & also that is the sexiest mofoin’ video I’ve ever seen. I watched it at least 33 times.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:18 pm eyeah, i was wondering what the fuck was so special until about the 2:30mm and then i was kind’ve blown away. i really like the lone spectator at the end and the anxiety present, which really serves well as someone for the viewer of the video to identify with.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:43 pm eI’m pretty sure the lone spectator – the woman at the end – is the singer. And her brother, the other half of The Knife, is the guy who starts dancing, to the tune of “I’m in love with your brother …” He’s also a DJ in ‘real life’ ~
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:10 pm eYes; that’s them, the brother and sister. So the lyrics
about “..Im in love with your brother..” and the dancing fit on
another level. That’s very rare, for them to
show their faces in performance like that…they are usually
in masks. The singer is Sweden’s #1 cross-dressing performer.
Hopefully it will drive the “do the Jane Fonda” video out of my
mind, but not Nikola in LA dancing to Peaches.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:07 am every cool…the trans element is quite interesting as well….
May 28th, 2007 at 6:48 pm eThanks for introducing me to The Knife via Rachel’s site. She said you had posted this video here. I’m so in love with their music at the moment that I just bought two of their albums, including “Deep Cuts” which has “Pass This On” included. Thanks Amy!
June 1st, 2007 at 4:08 am eYou are welcome, Collin! Glad to pass good music along …
Cheers!
Amy
June 1st, 2007 at 11:00 am eAmy, I bought the Deep Cuts CD just from seeing the video here and listening to their other songs online. Thanks for posting about The Knife.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:14 pm eWelcome, Ivy!
March 20th, 2008 at 7:01 pm e[…] This blog has received regular hits for The Knife’s “Pass This On” ever since I posted it at the end of May 2007. Since then, the video was removed by Youtube or the subscriber who posted it. Today, I found it elsewhere on the site (w/ an annoying “Z” in the upper corner) and posted it above for all of those Knife groupies on the hunt. You can view more of “The Knife” videos, which are wonderful, here. The music of this brother-sister moves us – yep. […]