Image: the Knife/Alexa Vachon
There’s no place quite like the emergency room waiting area. Really, there’s no wait quite like the emergency room wait. Just on the other side of those doors is either relief or doom or a bit of both, but it’s not ready for you quite yet. See, the thing is that the pain gets immeasurably worse than what you might be experiencing right now, believe it or not, and you’ll be tended to after all of those worse cases: the broken leg can wait for the gushing wound and the gushing wound can wait for the stopped heart. We’ll just be taking your insurance information here, and look, a fishtank. Old magazines.
Just in its title, the Knife’s most recent record, the greatly anticipated and near-perfect Shaking the Habitual, establishes the basic principle for this new video, for “Without You My Life Would Be Boring (Shaken-Up Version),” but also for its predecessors (there are at least four videos now, for the Knife’s Shaking material). They all imagine the world we live in and its bare everydayness as sites of potential eruption, like there is always a deep club beat just underneath the shared banality of everyday humans and its just a matter of cracking the door the tiniest bit to let it through.
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That’s all it takes, just a crack, and then that covert beat is here and, quite suddenly, the world becomes a particularly desperate place, where losing time is losing life. So: dance. Do something, anything. The end is nigh, maybe just through those ER doors, a case of bacterial meningitis away.
