Air Pop’s “Intelexual” Reveals What Flashes Past Your Eyes Before You Die

If you’re a social media mogul, that is.

February 18, 2015

Last time we checked in with Air Pop, he was gearing up for release of a short film he'd directed and soundtracked called Daisy Park, which was about two prison inmates who fall in love with the same woman. This most recent missive from the Los Angeles artist, "Intelexual," does a similar job of combining his ambitions as a filmmaker with his talents as a writer of anthemic pop songs—albeit in more traditional, music video form.

Over the self-described "screamo-pop" number by the same name, Air Pop plays the founder of a highly addictive, Instagram-like media sharing app who gets in a tragic motor cycle accident at the age of 27. For the most part, the video captures what flashes past his eyes in the moments before death—with the strange, very 2015 caveat that most of the images he sees appear to be selfies uploaded to the app by pretty ladies he likes. The song's lyrics, fittingly, read like a commentary on the practice of self-representation online: Well goodbye world/ How did you see/ You saw the best of me/ That I know/ And so it seems/ That it's real/ When you caught a glimpse of me. And somewhat more controversially, there's some interesting discussion in the video about the fictional app's disproportionate popularity among sexually liberated female users.

"There's definitely some dark-tech-age humor to the whole thing," Air Pop told The FADER via email. "It's what everyone is talking about these days: gender, the internet, and the revolution of female imagery plus self-awareness. I wanted to express my views through satire in parallel with genuine admiration [for women] and the current state of things. At the same time though, sometimes girls (and boys) just wanna have fun—and simply express themselves."

Air Pop’s “Intelexual” Reveals What Flashes Past Your Eyes Before You Die