A music video from UK electronic duo and recent Listen Out headliners Disclosure has been removed from the internet almost as quickly as it arrived.
This past weekend saw the debut of a clip for the Disclosure siblings’ new single, ‘Help Me Lose My Mind’, a tune featuring the haunting singing of London Grammar vocalist Hannah Reid taken from the pair’s Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Settle.
But not long after the video – which came with a parental advisory warning – was uploaded to YouTube, the dance music twosome’s label, PMR Records, removed the clip and issued a statement indicating that it was due to complaints over the clip’s glorification of drug use, as NME reports.
The video allegedly featured a bus full of partygoers that slowly become transparent, with or without the explicit aid of drugs being unclear now the video has seemingly been wiped from all online resources, but FACT noted that the parental advisory warning was “surely a reference to the fringed crop top that appears two minutes in rather than the fairly mild representation of spangled London teenagers heading out clubbing.”
Regardless, the video has since been removed by PMR Records – who handles Disclosure (one of the year’s most blogged about acts) and the likes of Julio Bashmore and Jessie Ware – with a full statement that reads:
The video for Disclosure’s new single was revealed this morning [11th October] and as with previous Disclosure videos, it was about the connection of people having a good time, something that Disclosure want associated with their music and what we hope people have done when they’ve seen the band live or while listening to their music. Unfortunately the video has received a few comments referencing the use of drugs within the video.
PMR feel very strongly against the glamorisation of drugs in any capacity and as such we have made the decision to remove the video.”
It’s unclear at this stage whether PMR Records had simply responded to negative comments over the video or not cleared the clip to begin with, but Disclosure – brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence – have yet to issue a comment about the removal of the music video. The song (which you can hear below) contains no explicit lyrical references to drug use or glorification; it is unknown if a new or re-edited video for ‘Help Me Lose My Mind’ is forthcoming.
UPDATE 14/10: Thanks to the efforts of a Vimeo user, the ‘Help Me Lose My Mind’ video has re-surfaced online in its original ‘Parental Advisory’ format, and really, the results are pretty tame. Sure, there’s some spaced-out looking club-bound youths, but without any explicit shots or footage involving drugs, a naive viewer could just as easily confuse them as being very tired. So was the video getting pulled the result of a knee-jerk reaction to the negative comments of some conservative viewers? Or simply a publicity stunt to get viewers interested in the new Disclosure single? Take a watch and that very, very mild four minutes below.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the label’s knee-jerk removal of the video comes at a time when the links between drug culture and dance music has come under intense media scrutiny following the high-profile deaths of punters at dance music festivals, including a 23 year old man at Australia’s Defqon.1 festival and the recent cancellation of the final day of New York’s Electric Zoo after two drug-related deaths.
Disclosure were just in Australia to headline the inaugural Listen Out, the boutique dance music festival that replaced Parklife, and while the event saw multiple drug arrests, with 94 Sydney punters arrested on drugs-related charges, while $10,000 of drugs was seized at the Melbourne leg; the reports paled in comparison to the controversy surrounding Brooklyn femcee Azealia Banks, who stormed off stage in Sydney in response to trash being thrown on stage, then again walking from her Melbourne set just minutes into the performance.
In related news, earlier this month Azealia Banks claimed she’d canned a slated collaboration with Disclosure for their debut album, calling her fellow Listen Out artists “rude”, only for the Lawrence brothers to respond to the rapper’s grievances by saying they “couldn’t give a damn” if Banks leaked the recordings of the collaboration, as NME reports.
