Captivity and power: Man, he never had a chance

Content warning: In this post I discuss (among other things) what I consider to be an artistically very effective use of what those parents' guides would call an "f-word derivative" in a punk rock music video. If that's not the sort of thing you want to expose yourself to, skip this one.


The Offspring -- what can I say except that sometimes I'm in the mood for them? Recently, writing about the "captivity and power of the devil" brought to mind the music video, directed by Chris Hopewell, for their song "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" (2008). I'll be discussing the video more than the song itself, so if you're not familiar with it go ahead and watch it first.

Some sort of fairy or demon or nymph or something appears and gives a peasant a magic guitar -- which, he soon discovers, makes people dance uncontrollably and give him money! So he leaves his farm and goes to the big city to Seek His Fortune. While he's making people dance and getting rich, he inadvertently discovers that the magic guitar apparently also has the power to cure people of the plague -- but he uses this as yet another way to make money, helping himself to a necklace from one of the women he has cured, and then goes back to just making people dance. Eventually the lamia or whatever she is decides enough is enough and takes back the guitar, and the guitarist sinks down through the floor into hell like Rumpelstiltskin.

The video shows the she-devil watching the peasant from time to time -- smiling when he cures the plague victims, affecting shock when he demands payment -- but these reactions of hers are fake. It's not as if she gives him the guitar to do good with and then becomes angry when he misuses it. The guitar was demonic from the beginning ("Show me how to lie..."), and there was never any expectation that he would use it otherwise than he does in fact use it.

The recurring lines "Now dance, fucker, dance / Man, he never had a chance" are (it would seem) addressed by the guitarist to his convulsively dancing victims and show how he cynically uses the power of music to manipulate others for his own gain. (There's obviously a huge "meta" element, here.) But we also hear those lines near the beginning, as we see the peasant walking off to use his shiny new guitar -- and I think the most effective part of the whole video is the scene where we see him with a big shit-eating smirk on his face, strutting into the Great and Spacious Building in his new tux, to a chorus of "Dance, fucker, dance!" Even in this moment of triumph, we can see that he's been played for a fool and is no less a dancing monkey than are his ostensible victims. The whole thing was a set-up, as evil always is.