Gatekeeping Youtube: Alice by Pogo

I recently got to attend a screening of Copyright Criminals, which is an excellent documentary about the history of sampling in music.  As I’ve always been an advocate (and occasional creator) of art which incorporates found sounds and images, this put me in the mood to find something along those lines.  This video’s been around a while, but it’s probably my favorite sample-built piece on YouTube.

I love that it’s not just the images that are drawn from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, but all the sounds as well.  This is not a fannish attempt to create a video “tribute” to Alice, or to tell the movie’s story in musical form.  Instead, it takes the pieces from the film and reassembles them into something entirely other.

There’s a haunting quality to the song Pogo creates, and it’s accentuated by the lack of coherent lyrics.  He cuts apart and reassembles Katherine Beaumont’s dialogue so that there are snatches of discernible words, but they don’t go anywhere.  The lines that get stuck in my head seem to say, “There is a long way… it’s a long, bitter [gibberish],” which I find unsettling in that good way.  This Alice is lost inside her own mind, and can’t even explain how she got there.  And as if that weren’t bad enough, those creepy flowers won’t stop singing.

This reading is supported by the visuals, which accentuate the contrast between Alice’s growing concern about getting home and the flippancy of the other characters.  You’ll also note that although things calm down at the end of the video, she never actually wakes up.