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In my Charli XCX edition of Man vs. Video, I made a comment about how her video was popular-online-opinion-pandering “web vomit”, on account of the opening shots of the ‘You (Ha Ha Ha)’ video being constructing solely of ASS and (a) PUSSY(cat). What a pleasant surprise I had then when I began watching the video of current HYPEbbz Wolf Alice’s song ‘Fluffy’. It opens with the lead singer, who I assume is named Wolf as either a tribute to Wolf from Gladiators or Lieutenant Worf, telling us the song is for her cat, Fluffy, who she has had neutered. First things first, the fact that Wolf said “neutered”, rather than “spayed”, suggests that this cat is male. This worries me, because who the fuck calls a male animal Fluffy? I’ll tell you, a goddamn nihilist, that’s who. That moniker is bad enough itself, but then Wolf goes and cuts Fluffy’s cock off, which, and I’m just putting this out there, I reckon she did herself with just a pair of nail clippers and the desire to do harm. Then, after all this, she has the hellish level of audacity to write a song as some kind of tribute to the fact you now have to talk about the cat’s masculinity in the past tense. We are dealing with dark depths of depravity here, people.
The rest of the group, who I will collectively refer to from here on as Alice, also show some alarming personality traits. The first of these appears at 00:45 when a 1/3 of Alice reveals that he has never been taught how to drink properly. There is something hugely upsetting about watching a fully-grown man failing to grasp the basics of self-nourishment. Watching him struggle gives me the same feeling I had at the end of the Jungle Book, when Mowgli enters society and you realise that, as he’s spent his entire life among animals, he has no, and will never have, any grasp of human language, let alone culture or traditions, and is doomed to spend the rest of his days an outsider, never being able to properly communicate, adapt or fit in. This is what I see when the milk spills down the front of a 1/3 of Alice’s top; a cascading waterfall of shame and loneliness you can almost see reflected in his cold, dead eyes.
There’s a point in the video where the removal of masculinity and the troubling characteristics of another 1/3 of Alice member cross paths. Here, one bandmate shows a complete inability to master the fundamentals of tool use. There might be some clever editing to show the actual hammer head hitting the fallen monitor, but I’m sharp-eyed enough to recognise 1/3 of Alice gearing up to hit the screen with the claw of the implement. As you can observe in this diagram, the claw of a hammer is not made for hitting. It’s made for pulling on things, specifically nails. Now, if we consider that a hammer can observed as a representation of “male-ness” and has been literally inverted from its normal use alongside the neutering, there is an argument to be made that Wolf’s only goal in leading the band is to wage a brutal war on masculinity. Truly disturbing.
As I don’t want to leave the article finishing on such a negative note, I feel the final section of the ‘Fluffy’ video needs a little attention. The segment moves away from the hate and instead turns into some kind of MAD RAVE, albeit a densely underpopulated one. Now, there are some emotions and reactions that words struggle to describe and, unfortunately, this is one of those moments. Luckily though, there’s a gif set that sums up my feelings towards the conclusion of the piece with phenomenal accuracy.
