The Breakout Music Video of the Year Has a Message for Men. What Is It?
· The Atlantic
As an alarm siren cried out, the 30-year-old Swedish rapper Yung Lean rushed to the stage of the MTV Video Music Awards last month, looking furious. His button-up shirt was spotted with what appeared to be blood; he smashed a chair on the floor, broke a Moon Person trophy, and took his place in the middle of 66 young men wearing ties, blazers, and blank looks on their faces. Then those men around him did something odd. They started dancing—in pulsating, fluid movements as hypnotically beautiful as a leaping pod of dolphins.
This was a live rendition of part of the most discussed music video of the year: “Storm,” by Gener8ion, a previously obscure collaboration between the French electronic musician Surkin and the French filmmaker Romain Gavras. The music features Lean warbling hoarsely over propulsive beats, and the video features him as a bully dominating his classmates. But the centerpiece dance sequence of the seven-and-a-half-minute clip is what attracted attention upon the song’s release, in April. “Storm” now has more than 34 million YouTube views, an eye-popping number at a time when music videos rarely reach anyone but an artist’s fans. TikTok and Instagram are full of people—kids, dancers, athletes, farmers, wedding guests—stomping and swaying like (but never as impressively as) the video’s boys.
Visit moryak.biz for more information.
The phenomenon has sparked a mystery: What does the dance mean? Set at a U.K. school in the year 2034, the “Storm” video fuses subtle sci-fi into a familiar tale of adolescence. At one point, Yung Lean’s character tears down a 6G cell tower and smokes metal shavings from the wreckage in a glass pipe. Lord of the Flies, American History X, and other cultural depictions of male bonding through brutality may come to mind for viewers. Some commenters have called “Storm” a celebration of masculine energy; others say that it subverts that very thing by showing boys diverting aggression into expressive movement.
On Sunday, I spoke with Damien Jalet, the choreographer who came up with the dance, and his interpretation was decisive: The point was to convey vulnerability—specifically, “male vulnerability.” Jalet wanted to show the soft interiority of boys under “pressure”; one of the topics he and Gavras discussed was the anxiety of attending school in an era when active-shooter drills are a reality. “As much as showing the strength and the power” of these young men, he told me, “I wanted to also portray the fear. I wanted to portray the sense of bonding, the sense of hope, but also of being overwhelmed by things.”
A 50-year-old French Belgian artist, Jalet has spent decades bridging contemporary dance with popular culture. His résumé contains prestigious performances at museums, ballets, and opera houses—but also multiple Madonna tours, a Thom Yorke and Paul Thomas Anderson video, the 2018 Suspiria remake, the Oscar-nominated (and divisive) 2024 movie musical Emilia Pérez. Much of his work involves unusual staging, strange patterns, and tonal solemnness. For “Chiroptera,” a 2023 collaboration with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, Jalet arranged 153 dancers on scaffolding above a Parisian plaza for what looked like a massive, haunting game of human Tetris. “I like to feel people being part of something that is bigger than themselves,” he told me.
“Storm” is very much in that vein. The individuals’ dances are “not really complicated,” Jalet said. “You can learn them in a day.” But combined, they convey the sense of a “force” passing through a crowd. Rather than have the boys all move as one, he arranged them into lines that mirrored one another in different ways at different times, creating syncopated ricochets of action. At one point, each participant seems to wipe tears from his eyes—a reference, Jalet said, to the idea that “men don’t cry.”
Executing the performance was in itself emotionally challenging. The video shoot, which took place over two days in Belgium last December, entailed eight takes, and “all the dancers were aware that any mistake would basically mean that we had to restart again from scratch,” Jalet said. For the VMAs, Jalet and his team had to teach steps to an entirely new cast of dancers. In rehearsals, “I could feel they were all in a very demonstrative mode, and showing a lot of strength, flexing muscles,” Jalet said. “And I was like, No, no, it’s not just about throwing this at us. You actually have to have it coming back at you—right in the chest. It needs to be something that you internalize, that you experience more than demonstrate.”
Since the video’s release, people all over the world are trying to recapture its magic. Some of the tribute videos feature groups of people dancing together in real life. But a lot of the clips are made with AI; software platforms have even created templates to generate “Storm” knockoffs. Many videos perform identity swaps: The schoolboys become, say, African dancers, or Ukrainian soldiers. Usually, one human user plays the part of Yung Lean, standing unmoving in the middle of the simulated, dancing horde. The motivation often seems to be to demonstrate the creator’s individuality, but after watching video after video in that style, one can’t help but think about the awful power of the internet hive mind.
Jalet feels a mixture of joy and horror at the “Storm” imitations. “I love every single video I see of people trying to do their own version physically,” he said. “I loathe any of the AI versions. I find it’s the laziest form of creativity.” Using technology to insert oneself into someone else’s work—typically uncredited work—is, he said, “an ego trip that I have no admiration for.” He pointed out that the video’s initial appeal reflected amazement for what people can do and computers can’t. Seeing a celebration of human bodies becoming slop has been “very disturbing, to be honest, and very dystopian.”
[Read: TikTok killed the video star]
I mentioned to him that some of the praise I’d seen for “Storm” had come from right-leaning accounts thrilled by the sight of young men stomping and hooting together. He replied that anyone who sees an authoritarian or masculinist bent in the video should watch more closely. “Usually, dancing men is not something that fascism is promoting—not at all, and especially not in that way,” he said. Although there is anger in the dance, “it’s catalyzed in a way that it’s a catharsis.”
That explanation fits with the complicated feelings I had watching the video at a moment when male groupthink is driving so many unsettling headlines. Yung Lean’s character, both scary and charismatic, is like a magnet moving across a tray of iron filings, organizing raw elements into new shapes. His classmates sport the buzz cuts and broccoli hair that typify their cohort; they wear uniforms of traditional manliness. But the dance captures each one fighting his own internal battle with the terror—and, perhaps, affection—they feel for the troublemaker in their midst. They’re being transformed—though whether for better or worse will depend on the individual.
There’s also something faintly transgressive about the fact that “Storm” has sparked popular fascination for contemporary dance—an art form widely viewed as the provenance of elites and as anything but macho. Indeed, Jalet sees “Storm” as being part of his career-long effort as a gay artist trying to “cool down” stereotypical masculinity and “amplify female power,” such as by choreographing a coven of witches in Suspiria. He fell in love with dance by watching Madonna on TV as a kid, and at age 15, he performed a dance to her song “Erotica” during a party at his church. The audience was impressed by his craft, but, he said with a laugh, “I was not sure they were really connecting to the message conveyed.”
Given that trajectory, this year’s VMAs was quite the landmark. Jalet’s work on Madonna’s Confessions II mini-movie ended up beating out “Storm” for the Best Choreography award (an untelevised category whose nominations were credited to musicians rather than choreographers—a “completely fucked-up” sign of his craft’s devaluation in pop culture, Jalet said). And though the show closed with “Storm,” it opened with a nine-minute Madonna performance, choreographed by Jalet, that featured lasers attached to women’s crotches and a scene of sexy, queer chaos set in a nightclub bathroom. “Storm” may seem like a completely different piece of art, but, as Jalet sees it, “the same free energy passes through both of them.” And perhaps, for some of the boys watching at home, that energy will ripple onward—having its own unpredictable effects.