If ever a song was recorded as an excuse for a music video, it was ‘Born Free’. The track itself – a bass-driven and mildly adolescent hymn to, y’know, being yourself and all that – is actually faded out for most of the video’s nine gruesome minutes.
Let’s not beat about the bush: the video depicts an episode in a ginger genocide. Stop sniggering. It’s not funny. A SWAT team batter their way into an apartment building, bash about a chubby couple in mid-coitus, then haul off a man with red hair. He joins a busload of other gingers. They are driven out into the desert, and lined up in front of a minefield. ‘Let’s fucking move!’ bellows the Rainbow Six extra. They don’t. So he shoots a twelve-year-old in slow motion at point-blank range. And the redheads begin to run. And the mines begin to go off.
Director Romain Gavras, the man behind the riot on the steps of the Sacre Coeur in the video for Justice’s ‘Stress’, strikes again with another piece of mind-blowing banality that somehow sticks in your head and keeps replaying itself on your eyelids every time you blink. ‘Born Free’ is childish, gut-wrenching and unforgettable in equal measure. Watch it and weep.
