This year has seen the proliferation of the twerk-fest, butt-centric music video – from Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda to JLo and Iggy Azalea’s Booty, but perhaps the most unexpected culprits of the butt-video craze were Atlanta metal giants Mastodon, whose new video for The Motherload features a motherload of shaking asses.
Responses to the video have been mixed, with a column in The Guardian calling the song, which features on Mastodon’s recent album Once More ‘Round The Sun, “brilliant” but labels the video “sexist”. Speaking to Pitchfork, drummer and vocalist Brann Dailor has defended the clip, claiming it shouldn’t be “taken so seriously”.
“I just don’t see the sexism in it. I know there’s half-naked women that are shaking their butts. For some people it’s titillating, but for me it just looked amazing,” he said. “It’s a music video and it’s really not supposed to be something that gets people this upset because this was really a fun thing that doesn’t really mean too much.”
Dailor said the band’s inspiration for the video came from a desire to “make something that was bizarre — that would confuse people” and revealed the idea began as a sort of parody of ’90s heavy metal videos. He admitted no “high concept” was discussed.
“We weren’t trying to make fun of hip-hop videos. It was a fine line, because I didn’t want it to come off being sexist, so I thought that maybe the females took centre stage and looked powerful and had this dance battle.”
“I don’t feel like what we were trying to do was jump on any twerking bandwagon,” he added. “We just wanted to put something into our music video that people would probably think, ‘That shouldn’t be there,’ or, ‘Those two things don’t go together, they shouldn’t be together.’
“I wanted to just put them together because we can.”
