Imagine the girl of your dreams gets taken by a sexually appetitive gorilla. Sounds a bit like King Kong, doesn’t it? Except, in this case, the gorilla is a high school basketball team mascot named Trevor. This is the foundation of Tame Impala’s latest video from Currents for the track “The Less I Know The Better.”
Taking the lovelorn lyrics of the song, “Ran out the door together, she was holding hands with Trevor/Not the greatest feeling ever,” Tame Impala’s concept is re-worked in the context of a high school, where a presumably popular girl (even though she’s on the color guard team) falls for a basketball star, enjoys getting eaten out by him in the locker room and then tosses him aside for the gorilla man.
While she may be wearing a North Huskies jacket at the beginning of the Canada-directed video, this high school girl clearly prefers the gorilla aesthetic as she gets repeatedly taken into “Trevor’s” hands and arms while her now ex watches in a tortured sort of reverie as he’s bound and blindfolded in a hallucinatory motif that intensifies with the paint dripping special effects that transition from a body suit to a basketball court.
Indeed, the special effects heavy nature of the video are in keeping with the psychedelic feel of Currents (and its album artwork) as our anti-heroine whips a fur cape around her that morphs into Trevor, followed by a series of animated renderings of them (during which the Empire State Building is none too subtly flashed) enjoying their newfound bliss together.
In the end, the high school boy triumphs against his King Kong adversary by walloping him with a basketball to the chest. It isn’t exactly beauty that exterminated him, so much as the jealousy prompted by teenage-run testosterone. Nonetheless, it’s an equally effective method for a woman-stealing gorilla to meet his demise.
