Animal by Aurora - Lyric and Music Video Analysis
On January 24th, 2019 (three days ago), Aurora released the music video for her new single "Animal". It's a lively song about human emotions and losing control. Certain parts are slow, steady, and memorizing. It picks up the pace slightly more and leads into the energetic chorus.
It's dramatic, vibrant, and full of color. We're animals hunting for other animals, others like ourselves. She describes being an animal. What we would be like if we had no control.
The music video is vibrant and full of energy, and at the same time, mystery. The lighting is dim, and almost always, the light is either red, blue, or green. This leaves an interesting feel and appearance to the video. The lyrics fit the video, and what is happening in it, very well.
The beginning of the music video shows a cage on the back of a truck, as if it's transporting a large animal. The blanket on the bottom moves and Aurora, in a red dress, crawls out of the blanket and looks at her surroundings. Her expression is wild, angry confusion, and resentful of being locked up.
The video switches between her in the cage and her in a blue room looking into a mirror. When she's in the room, her only focus is on the mirror and her reflection. Almost like how an animal would jump at its own reflection, or she is obsessed with it because she feels lonely, she is hunting for another animal like herself. On the back of the truck, the lights flash red, but in the mirror room it's steady blue.
She manages to break the door on the cage open and escape. Causing her to be loose in the streets of the city. Loose to wreck havoc and do whatever she wants. She dances wildly on the concrete in celebration of being free while the other Aurora dances in front of the mirror.
The lyrics in the beginning part of the video are:
You are the victim
The victim of my love
She accidentally hurts the people she loves, Because she's an animal , she's too rough. They can't escape. She won't let this love go and will hunt them if they try to leave. And they would be at the mercy of her wild behavior.
I dangle up on rooftops
Before I push you off
She dangled on the top of the cage before she push the door open. The line could be about getting tired of one person, and she's an animal so there's not much sense or logic. Just doing what she feels like. This could also be pushing someone away before they betray or leave. Like the lyric on Taylor Swift's "I Did Something Bad", You gotta leave before you get left.
My second theory is also similar to the book, One Hundred and One Arabian Nights when the king, Shahryar, finds that his wife betrayed him, he has her executed, but at night her memory haunts him. To combat this, he married a woman every day, but the next morning, would have her killed so she would not have enough time to betray him. (That continued until someone changed the king's heart, but that's another story).
I stand at the headlights
Looking for a corner where I can't be found
Predators like to be in an area where they can't be seen. In a corner she could pounce on a new, unsuspecting victim like a wild cat.
With a goddess in my right eye
Watching every lover on the battleground
The goddess may be referring to how goddesses can always get what they want, they can scan the ground below, choose a target, and take it. Genius lyrics says that it may be a reference to Ra's eye. With that thought, it may also be about the marks she puts around her eyes, in the video there's two lines vertical lines below both eyes, and how most Egyptian gods are part animal.
)Love is like a war, and every war has a battleground, where everyone fights for whatever they are after. In war everyone gets hurt, and after experiencing one, you're never the same. She picks the people battling for love on the battleground, because that's what she wants too.
You're hunting for love
Killing for pleasure
Lost in a concrete jungle
Hunting is something sometimes associated with animals and is also used when some is very determined in finding something, in this case, love. It also connects with a line from one of her songs, "Forgotten Love", "I'm in love with the hunt itself"
"Killing for pleasure" could be literal and metaphorical. When someone yearns for something, they sometimes feels as if they would kill to have it. If this is literal, it might mean she was too rough and accidentally killed the victim.
The city can be a confusing maze for someone who doesn't see forests very much. I like this metaphor of the city being a concrete jungle. Aurora grew up in nature and forests in Norway. In her documentary "Nothing is Eternal", she said:
Being in a big city for the first time was like being in an ocean, not knowing how to breath or move. - Aurora
If I am alone
Make me a stranger
Lost in a concrete jungle
If she's alone and has no one, she wants to be a stranger, with no responsibilities or anyone she has to go back to, in the city where she can do anything and meet anyone.
I'm an animal, animal
Hunting for an animal, animal
She's an animal, untamed and not much self control, looking for another like herself who is wild. We all want to find someone like ourselves, almost like a way to develop clans and make friends. She's also searching for another animal because she wants love, but if it were a regular person in control, they would think she was being weird and would be scared. Obviously, she wouldn't like it if he was scared, so she wants to find another animal, someone who lost control and doesn't care.
Hunting for love
Killing for pleasure
Lost in a concrete jungle
"Isolation makes her hungry" and she wants to find another like herself. She sees a man walking alone on the street. She dances in front of him briefly before pecking him on the lips. He falls back and faints while Aurora dances away. The camera switches to the man for a second to show a trickle of blood coming from his mouth. Like the lines from earlier, she was ready to pounce when someone came by. He was a victim of her untamed nature.
After, she walks over to a window by a small green light. She stares at it in wonder as if she's hypnotized and seems to believe at first that it's another person. She treats it almost like the Aurora in the blue room treats the mirror.
She slides against it, and finds an egg. She stares at it and eats it before running off. This and the green light could mean greed, and the egg is smooth almost like skin.
The second verse plays at this section:
Isolation makes me hungry
Will you stay here till I sleep?
Being alone made her want love and pleasure even more. She wants someone to stay with her so she won't be lonely.
You'll return home in the morning
But you never really leave
I keep the memories alive
The weight upon my shoulders felt so divine
Even though the person may leave, they never leave her memory, and she can always replay those memories in her mind.
With a goddess in my right eye
Watching every step I take before I die
She's watching what she does, because she knows life is short, she wants to complete her quest to find another animal.
She enters an alley way and dances in it before entering a building and finds a red night club full of people squirming around. She is perplexed about the place. Red light fills the entire room.
She walks through and into an empty room with blue light and a mirror. That's when it's revealed that the video was switching between her in the future in the room and a video of how she got there.
She spits out an egg and puts it in the sink next to her. Then she spits out more eggs. This doesn't support the theory that she's greedy about the eggs, because if she was greedy about them she would spit them out, unless she was keeping them in the sink for safe keeping. But maybe the eggs symbolize control. When she ate the first egg, she became a little more human and didn't lung at people. And when she gets rid of the eggs, she's getting rid of her control. It fits with the next line in the song.
She also talks about eggs in one of her posts on Twitter.
Let me become an animal
Let me become an animal
'Cause when you are an animal
You lose control
She wants to lose control because to her it feels fun. Some people like it when they give into what their desires.
She enters the red room again. She gets caught up in the people like a wave. Twisting around like coiling snakes. It reminds me of the repeated line in "It Happened Quiet" is "Love is wild".
She finally found animals like her.
I love the overall feeling and look to the music video, as well as the story. I also really like the song.
This is my interpretation of the song and video. I enjoy writing this. Hopefully I will get Aurora's interpretation too.
Thank you for reading.
Great review, thorough and insightful. Aurora's song may be considered as part of a feminist narrative reacting against traditional machista conceptions of love and gender relations.
Males have usually been conceptualized as dominant and in a way have become the predators that literally "kill for pleasure" (Roberto Bolaño said it all in his mega novel 2666).
It is not a new thing to see women reversing the roles. I personally reject the idea of exploring our animal side in response to societal norms under the assumption that we have been domesticated beyond our due, but there is a need, no doubt, to explore our instincts and insights to see beyond what our societies have presented as THE way of living/being/feeling.
Thank you. That's an interesting perspective. I didn't think of it as a feminist song, but everyone gets different impressions of different songs. Although I do not think people should act like animals, I find what she sings is an interesting thought and I still enjoy the song.
Aurora has released her second single for her new album. I have made a review for this single if you would like to read it.
https://steemit.com/music/@scarletskylor/the-seed-by-aurora-review-and-analysis
I wrote a review about another artist's song. Here is the link if you want to read it. I would appreciate it if you did. https://steemit.com/music/@scarletskylor/me-taylor-swift-music-video-review
Really nice interpretation @scarletskylor 😉 though I might have my own simple interpretation of her song and video😊 but I like your review anyway. Human is an animal with mind (not just brain) and when hunting for love, people could be out of their mind 😉
Thank you, for reading and for the nice comment, I'm glad you liked it. I have a tendency to look into things like this and try to find a deeper meaning, for example, I spent a good amount of time wondering what the eggs were symbolizing or why she was obsessed with the mirror. That's true that humans have minds, the ability to think on a more complex level than animals, in my point of view what separates us from animals the most is having control and thought.
Aurora has released another single and I made a review for it. I would really appreciate it if you took some of your time to read it. https://steemit.com/music/@scarletskylor/the-seed-by-aurora-review-and-analysis
Thanks for the reminder.. I'll check them out
Hello @scarletskylor, thank you for sharing this creative work! We just stopped by to say that you've been upvoted by the @creativecrypto magazine. The Creative Crypto is all about art on the blockchain and learning from creatives like you. Looking forward to crossing paths again soon. Steem on!