In case you haven't seen this video yet, it's by Nickelback, for their song "Far Away." I was about to post a comment on Youtube about it, but my roommate suggested that this would be a more appropriate place to talk about it. First of all, I highly suggest that you sit down and watch the video, listen to the song, and, most importantly, read the comments. It's enormously fascinating from an aesthetic point of view: this is pure kitsch, and yet it provokes genuine emotion from literally hundreds of thousands of people. Lyrically, it's enormously vague--who can honestly say that they've never felt the pain of being separated from a love object? I think that pretty much explains the wide appeal, but the video is even more interesting, as if they're trying to pack so much emotional impact into 4 clean minutes that it starts to dribble out the sides. I haven't watched TV or seen mainstream music videos in a while, so maybe my reaction to this is someone extreme and unwarranted, but this just seems to be me to be the epitome of modern music: slick, overproduced, and designed to make proverbial low blows to our brain's systems of semiotics. It's like a commercial, almost, infiltrating your brain and replacing your own ideas about love and relationships and replacing it with pre-digested, sanitized pabulum. On that note, to leave you, from the Postal Service and the ever-eloquent Ben Gibbard,

"I was waiting on a cross-town train in the London Underground
When it struck me that I've been waiting since birth to find
A love that would look and sound like a movie..."