DANGER ZONE! WE’VE BEEN CONTAMINATED — BANKS RELEASES AN INFECTIOUS LYRIC VIDEO (2019)
That’s usually how it goes; an artist releases an album, we place our opinion somewhere on the hate-love scale and we either obsess or forget about the whole thing. When Banks put out III over a month ago she left us little room for anything other than praise and applause. With the record on repeat naturally the ranking of our favorite songs began to take shape. Since “Contaminated”, the third single from III, has just been reimagined as a lyric video (first being a visualizer), let me try and contain my excitement as this particular song is my personal number one favorite on the album.
Darkness comes to Banks naturally. It reveals itself in the subject matter, in the soundscape and in the overall atmosphere of her art. Even though Rolling Stone classified her genre as emo goth-pop, I dare say Banks is a little too classy and collected to be the midnight of despair. It’s certainly true that the most alluring aspects of what she does are somber, yet where there’s pain, there’s also so much pride. “Contaminated” stands out on the album for those exact reasons, it’s sophisticated, deliberate and sensual.
According to Banks herself, the single “is about being addicted to a toxic relationship. The more you give, the less of yourself you become”. If love or friendship is a weighing scale, it doesn’t have to be perfectly stable for things to work out, yet if it’s constantly unbalanced, you’re under a dark cloud just waiting to burst into heavy rain. For one of a million reasons, something that felt only slightly out of place at the beginning gradually contaminates the whole relationship. Time and effort might repair the bond, after all, it would be such a shame to lose all the energy we invested in it, right? Well, it takes guts to admit that something so promising grew to be toxic but it needs to be done guys, no more denial. Time to go.
I know what we need, you start letting me go, our love is tainted.
The lyric video, being a peculiar dance routine, dipped in blue, green and pink, conveys the chaos of trying to break the habit. Remember the burning lily from the visualizer clip? The symbol of devotion is back in the lyric video, as if to silently watch the dancer striking more and more grotesque poses on behalf of Banks’s vision. This dance of rhapsodic singing and sinister delicacy of movement paints the picture of poisoning agony that one is perfectly capable of ending and somehow far from doing so.
Her work is intense and atmospheric, nobody does it better than Banks. Some people probably secretly wish this talent was contagious but contrary to the single’s title, you cannot just be infected with this much passion and self-expression. That said, as if injected, her art gets deep under our skin leaving no way to decontaminate our system.
