Watch Braids’ beautiful video for the lyrically uncompromising ‘Miniskirt’
One of the strongest lyrical songs released this year, Braids’ ‘Miniskirt’ from their recent Album Of The Week is a direct and uncompromising song about the male gaze.
“You feel you’ve the right o touch me because I asked for it,” Standelle sings set to growing synth line.
Once the song breaks into percussive mode, it gets more personal and distressing, confirming a possibly very-true uncomfortable past, in which Standelle and her mother were turfed out of their house by former partner of her mother’s and were forced to live in a woman’s shelter for nine months.
“There was once a man who was proposing to love us all of us / instead he is full of hate himself, towards his bait and everything he touches is for him / my mother’s soul he devours with a grin,” she sings in a way that results in stomach knots and chills for the listener.
The video by Kevan Funk is a dramatic yet beautiful match:
“I wanted to create something that could compliment the track as opposed to trying to compete with its power. When thinking about the song and it’s content, I began very interested in the idea of commodification and control of femininity in a patriarchal societal construct, and liberation from that restraint. A central consideration that emerged from that was a historical relationship to nature, in terms of the patriarchal and imperial societal impulse to control, conform and dominate. That dynamic and the songs authorial resistance to that entitlement is what ultimately formed the thematic core of the video.”
