Possimiste. Positive pessimist, I guess? Is that bottle of Brennivin half full or half empty? Why is everything going round and round? Can I stay out until 6am in Reykjavik without going bust? And how do I avoid knocking down that troll in the road?
You need possimism to live in Iceland but she’s actually Estonian-born, as Leeni Laasfeld. For tonight she’s an honorary Nordic, she sounds like Aurora when she talks and Tallinn is only a short ferry trip from Finland, anyway.
She paints herself as “a lucid dreamer who brings songs into this world from other galactic dimensions” and ‘Monster’, her new single deals with “the emotional turmoil of living in a world fraught with societal and environmental challenges” while “offering listeners a powerful message of empowerment and hope.”
The monster can be beaten. I’m sure there are quite a few Icelandic myths and legends about that.
It would be easy to interpret the monster here as a bogey man. President Putin for example and I’d be more than happy to throw Starmergeddon into the equation but enough of that.
But if I understand it the monster here is interpreted as ‘abuse’ in many different forms and left to your own imagination to put a personal spin on it. Again, if I’ve got a handle on it the message is how we can so easily be sucked into the false messages of that abuse and come to accept it as the norm; losing the will to fight it.
It’s a chirpy little number, with innovative use of synthesisers and quite catchy although the hook, as good as it is, might perhaps have been manipulated a little further still, perhaps with a key change or two.
The video, by Leeni and Patrik Ontkovic, deserves close attention. It is riddled with imagery and allegory, its rapid fire images embracing blood on products (representing the dangerous conditions Third World workers must endure?) what might be crack cocaine, and a dead fish (a comment on Iceland’s fishing industry??)
The monster is tamed and leashed by Leeni but she and her followers are clearly infected by it as they adopt its blood red eyes.
In the final scene, a Last Supper representation (Macron must have watched it), they toast each other in what could be communion wine or more likely blood as they admire each others’ clothes while some poor kid sews them in a Bangladeshi sweat shop.
Then, in what is I am sure a deliberately corny pastiche, the Earth is placed in a microwave to cook. As for the nutcrackers, I daren’t even think what they are going to be used for.
I could take the view that perhaps there’s too much going on and in consequence the message(s) are diluted but it’s certainly entertaining and provocative.
What fascinates me is where she got the visual concept for the Monster from. If you’ve ever seen Walerian Borowczyk’s La Bête (The Beast), a cult erotic horror film which was the first to introduce teratophilia (attraction to monsters) into cinematography, you might feel you’ve seen this monster before, huge claws, red eyes ‘n all.
If you’ve never seen that film by the way (I think it might be banned now and the short extracts on YouTube are heavily censored) I can guarantee it’s the most pornographic imaginable.
Better, perhaps, to stick to Leeni’s imagining of the monster!
I see she has toured the UK recently and stopped off at my old watering hole, The Eagle in Salford. Hopefully it won’t be long before she’s back.
Find her on:
Website: https://www.possimiste.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Possimiste
X/Twitter: https://x.com/Possimiste
Instagram: https://x.com/Possimiste
