Teen People Meets West Side Story

By all accounts, the recently-released video for Best Coast's song "Our Deal" should be right up my alley. I like Best Coast. I like "Our Deal," not just because it's a good song but also because the band takes their usual beachy-fun sound and slows it down a bit, leaving us with something more akin to walking on the boardwalk at night, watching the lights on a merry-go-round and eating hot dogs in a post-sunstroke daze. And, as the existence of this blog attests, I'm a sucker for anything having to do with mid-twentieth century American culture, especially the SoCal culture that Best Coast likes to evoke.

The problem with the video for "Our Deal" is that, rather than taking the song's laid back sound and creating a visual representation to flow along with it, the video's director, Drew Barrymore, instead lays the song over top of a tired West Side Story/Rebel Without a Cause mishmash populated by actors too young to remember the early 90s, much less the 50s. I have no beef with Drew Barrymore, and I'm probably one of the few people who liked Whip It!, but the same anachronism that plagued that film also drags down "Our Deal." When is the video set, exactly? The main characters are straight out of Grease, but everyone else is running around tagging walls like it's 1982 and dressing like they're either rejects from a John Singleton film or part of a roving pack of digruntled GAP employees who quit in the middle of the spring denim sale. I'm assuming, based on its designation as a "Supervideo," that MTV had a hand in producing the video, and their imprint is all over it -- no matter how hard they try to be "indie" (or quirky, or urban, or anything other than Teen-People-white), their product still comes out with a glossy sheen, like you're looking into a bubble where everyone is perpetually pretty and well-lit.

It's a shame, too, because when they're left to their own devices, Best Coast is perfectly capable of translating their sound into a visual medium. Their video for "Boyfriend" is everything "Our Deal" isn't. It's genuine, it's interesting, and it brings to life an aspect of SoCal culture -- a Latina girl's Quinceañera -- that you don't often see represented on film, rather than cobbling together a story that people have been telling since before Romeo and Juliet.