Can Someone Explain To Me What The Actual Hell Is Going On In This Music Video For Hinder's Lips Of An Angel?

Every day since January 20th has felt like an eternity. Donald Trump's inauguration as President Of The United States has resulted in a daily deluge of horrors that any reasonable human should be terrified of. I've basically immersed myself in cinema, schoolwork and writing as a way to escape the horrors of reality for a brief period before returning to the nightmare that is our world now. Escapism is all well and good but we gotta keep in touch with what is real after all. That being said, can I just offer you, dear reader, a momentary sense of escapism by just overly examining a silly music video? Let's get a few yuks before going back to praising the likes of ACLU for standing up to what's right.

Now, this overtly ridiculous music video in question is for Hinder's Lips Of An Angel, a song I was most familiar with as a 10-year-old solely because of Jack Ingram's country music cover. Imagine my shock when, on an Elementary school field, I heard the original version of this song playing over the speakers. It was like finding out Santa Claus isn't real, it's a psyche altering experience. A little over a decade year later, Hinder's version of the tune strikes me as one of those pieces of music that is trying way too hard to be "SERIOUS" and "GRIM". It's like a Zack Snyder movie in a song.

The vocal accompaniment of Hinder's Lips Of An Angel already more than qualifies for that description, but it's in the music video where this tune's desperation to be weighty reaches a level of unintentional humor that's kind of bizarre. First off, the band is performing in some kind of green apartment surrounded by a whole bunch of candles because...moodiness?? As for the people performing amidst the candles, every movement of these guys as they perform the song is so heightened to a comical extreme that it undercuts the intended solemn atmosphere of the music video. These guys wanna be intense, but they look more like 5-year-olds smashing their Fisher-Price instruments together.

Everyone else in the band is practically restrained compared to lead singer Marshal Dutton, whose look in this music video suggests the appearance he was channeling in the mid-2000's was "Marilyn Manson meets Nick Swardson". This guy is just so damn over-the-top in every gesture, vocal delivery, everything he does, the only rational response is to laugh as to not let the insanity you're witnessing destroy your brain completely. What are his hand gestures supposed to convey beyond an impression of flailing about like an inflatable tube man that stands outside a car dealership? Why is does he keep choking himself with his tie? Wait a minute, why is he wearing a tie what appears to be just a normal T-Shirt? Watching this man's over-the-top movements while singing in this music video is akin to the experience of watching a Neil Breen movie, it's hard to understand what exactly Dutton or the people behind this video were even conceptually going for 

And I haven't even gotten to the laughably cheesy flashback sequences, framed in black-and-white and a different aspect ratio and which make great use of slow-motion. Look, it's all just an incredibly funny exercise in stylized visual tricks that don't quite gel with the "TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!!!" aesthetic both the music video and song itself are trying to go for.  The tonal dissonance makes for a pretty terrible music video, but it is a goldmine of comedy. In the end, the real lips of an angel can be found on those emitting laughter upon watching this music video.