I’ve written a few things recently about the power of a video to convey additional information that would clutter up a lyric and the new John Grant video is an extraordinary example. To my ears, perhaps because I know a lot about Grant’s upbringing in a homophobic religious household, Glacier felt far more personal than political but this video recontextualises it as a hymn to the perseverance of the gay rights movement. It’s easy to do a machine-gun-paced montage badly — Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror is just a barrage of Heavy Stuff That Happened — but the speed of change here, both visual and historical, is emotionally overwhelming. Every time I see it, I’m left stunned.
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DORIAN LYNSKEY is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, published by Faber and Faber (March 2011) and Ecco (April 2011). He writes for the Guardian, The Word, Q, Spin and Empire.
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