Chicane’s “Poppiholla” cover tackles Sigur Ros, racial prejudice

It wasn’t supposed to, but this video for Chicane’s cover of Sigur Ros’s “Poppiholla” made me do a LOL of considerable volume.

First there’s the fact that Chicane have bothered covering this song at all. If you don’t recognise the title, it’s also known as “That One From David Attenborough’s Planet Earth Which Makes You Feel All Poignant And Misty-Eyed About The Fate Of The Polar Bear For A Couple Of Minutes On A Sunday Night Before You Turn Over To Big Brother.”

Chicane have managed to strip out all of the emotion that the original somehow made people feel, and turned it instead into a plinky-plonky trance yawnfest the like of which you may have thought died with Robert Miles. Robert Miles isn’t dead? Oh.

Anyway, the video. So there’s a BLACK MAN in a HOOD walking along kind of FURTIVELY, getting GLANCES from WHITE PEOPLE who seem to THINK that HE is GOING to BUTCHER THEIR FAMILIES OR SOMETHING. This “walking along furtively” part of the video takes up about two of the video’s three minutes, and I estimate that in this time the clip’s protagonist must cover about five yards.

But then it all kicks off, because hoody man sees something – at this point we know not what – in the distance to which he must sprint at high speed. Wouldn’t you know it, his sprint is blocked by a bunch of oblivious dawdlers, each one of whom seems to be carrying a receptacle containing liquid.

Hoody man manages to smash into each one of these people, leading to spillage after spillage. He is almost certainly going to have a hefty dry-cleaning bill when this is all over.

So what’s he running towards? Uh oh – it’s a PRETTY WHITE FEMALE. At this point the viewer, the big racist, is supposed to think: “I KNEW IT. I KNEW THE BLACK MAN IN THE HOOD WAS GOING TO TURN OUT TO BE A BIG RAPER, AND HERE I AM GOING TO VIEW THE EVIDENCE IN GRAPHIC DETAIL.”

Only – aha! – with superhuman vision, anticipation and speed, hoody man has seen that a PILE of BRICKS is about to FALL onto the PRETTY HEAD of the WHITE LADY. Rather than mugging/killing the pretty poppet, he has quite literally SAVED HER LIFE.

I think there’s a lesson in there for all of us.

Buy Chicane tracks at 7digital