Marlon Joseph Tesoro Battad - Cold and Clean

Put simply the song was written and recorded in 2010 as a somewhat ironic reflection on how people can either elevate and/or degrade themselves and others to escape blame and painful experiences which, in retrospect, is disrespectful to the idea of religion and gods. In the context of recent exposure to shallow readings and internalizations of astrological symbolism the words felt appropriate. When I returned to the song in 2022 I wanted to change some of the lyrics including the gendered language but decided it actually worked well when paired with the video. I also tried to include the line “more than men we like to be” but this is only vaguely audible over the original vocals.
When I made the video I was both getting a hang of using the software and calming down so I opted for something I felt was simpler. The ever-frustrated and symbolic Batman plus his reflections and counterparts, the old King Joe cartoon, and the video of the angry young man all seemed to work well together with the found footage. I threw in some other visual modes of categorization and tried to break them down and put them back together again, throwing in some more serious social, political implications at the end that I find hard to articulate with more words than I’ve already mentioned in the trigger warning. The result might be more shock value than entertainment to a lot of viewers. The catchy tone of the song, combined with the colorful images and cartoons are, in hindsight, incredibly inappropriate combined with the serious nature of some of the implied themes, such as the closing shots of the angry young man looking over at the two young femmes being intimate with the simplistic political compass superimposed over the whole scene. At the time I felt that making a bit of a mockery of this anger was a way of diffusing it or letting people who feel this way see themselves in a different light, but I’ve been told that this isn’t always the result and that it might also imply sympathy for this point of view.