“Valentine’s Day” is the best song on David Bowie’s The Next Day, and since this is Bowie we’re talking about, the school shooting anthem was actually a pretty obvious candidate for a music video. There isn’t anything as overwhelmingly provocative here as there was in the videos for “The Stars (are out Tonight)” or “The Next Day.” There doesn’t need to be: we have David Bowie sitting on a stool in an empty building, playing one of those headless guitars that looks like a Rock Band prop. As the video progresses, Bowie’s facial expressions and manic gesticulations build from casual and performative to bloodthirsty and demented. Eventually, you might start to wonder if that’s a guitar he’s holding at all…
Watch for the gleeful violence in Bowie’s delivery of the second “It’s in his scrawny hands.” Terrifying stuff.
