Monday 29 April 2013

The Bilz and Kashif - My Ride

The Bilz and Kashif have released their new album called The Trinity. To celebrate, they have released a video for My Ride.

The video consists of shots of the group, girls and a white car. Desi music videos are often criticised for having the same unoriginal themes of cars, scantily-clad girls and alcohol. If you sing about cars and girls, then you have a valid excuse to use them in the video. But just having girls hanging around one car occasionally looking into the camera is boring.

The group have made good videos in their career. But for me this one isn’t one of their best. There is no interesting storyline or humour. The monochrome minimalist set was uninspiring and made the car blend into the background. The whole video felt rushed to coincide with the album release and could have been better if they had allowed more time to come up with interesting concepts.

My favourite part of the video were the trombone players who looked like they were having lots of fun. They even had their own choreographers. Unlike the models whose dance moves were limited to bending their knees and trying not to fall off their high heels.

The song is catchy. My Ride has a strong arrangement with some nice chords and I like the laid back beat. However, the lyrics let it down. The English lyrics don’t quite connect to the Punjabi ones and the end of the chorus runs out of lyrics altogether. The words to the song are full of cheesy car related innuendos such as “I wanna put my gear in between your headlights.” It gets worse: “I wanna set your speed limit.” There’s even a bondage reference.

Objectifying women is sadly common in the Desi music industry. But actually comparing a woman to a car made me feel slightly sick. I subscribe to the compensation theory and if I heard someone playing My Ride in their car I would be unimpressed. It’s creepy and more My Strange Addiction than exotic and alluring.

Overall My Ride is lewd enough to make Honey Singh blush. Unless you are a man who loves cars more than women this will have little appeal.



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