Yet another of those surrealistic music videos.

[Neville]

Alright, so you have a song that deals with lots of sea imaginery, but we all know how much it sucks to shoot in the beach or underwater. What to do?

El último de la fila - Cuando el mar te tenga.

Spanish duo "El último de la fila" is not exactly a fair representative of the kind of music ever made in my country, but they do have a massive cult following. Not hard to imagine why, because the were both brilliant and damn weird. More surprising is that they finally enjoyed mainstream success in their later years. The critics are still trying to describe their style.

[Inyarear]

Heh. Of course these days, with the help of computers and some innovations in technology, people can do just about anything in a music video, even on a low budget.

Incidentally, we do have a function for embedding those videos here, so I've taken the liberty of embedding this discovery of yours in this post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFeSF0I-hQg

I'd say no musical band ever really "represents" any given country to the rest of the world, though of course some musicians do get famous internationally and one can often detect the effects certain cultural influences have had on those musicians' works.

Surreal scenery, though, has been a part of music videos just about right from the start. If El último de la fila were doing that video in English, they'd fit right in with some of our musicians here in the USA. In some places, such as where I live, they probably already have quite an audience. (My home state North Carolina has a burgeoning population of immigrants from Mexico, legal and otherwise.)

Here's one of my favorite surreal music videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0B357TlnAg

I think it's based on a famous surrealist painting I've seen somewhere before, but the name of that painting escapes me.

[Neville]

Nice, thanks for the "embedding". 

Nice video, BTW (Fiona apple?). Looks like a painting, as you say, but don't know much about art to identify it.

I remember music videos made in the 80s before the MTV boom were often quite surreal, and not always in the good sense. I remember buying a VHS Dire Straits compilation back in the early 90s, and everything before 1985 looked awful.

[BTM]

You want surreal?  Try this s**t!  It's downright f**king creepy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Az_7U0-cK0

[Inyarear]

"Brains!" anyone?

As I say, though, surrealism in music videos is nothing new. Here's a classic example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Zg9Gjpmgc

The music video does kind of follow logically from the equipment-smashing antics The Who had lately been performing on stage, but still, those late 1970s fashions and the exploding radios and the girl in a plastic tube are all pretty weird stuff.

People sometimes talk about how prescient MTV was for playing this in its very first broadcast, but I think the broadcast was more of a declaration of war: if that radio star isn't dead yet, they're saying, we're going to kill him now. I'd say The Buggles were more prescient in making this video in the first place.