The Song I Thought Was About a Clock

Just before I moved to Berlin—two-plus years ago now—I was genuinely, humiliatingly obsessed with Uffie. Not critically, not ironically. The way you’re obsessed with something that scrambles a specific circuit and keeps scrambling it no matter how many times you hear it. She was the most exciting thing I’d encountered in music: half-rapped, half-sung bratty electro over Ed Banger beats, delivered with an attitude that felt custom-built to short-circuit the part of my brain responsible for good judgment.

The song that hooked me deepest was Pop The Glock. For a long time I had no idea what the title meant—Glock in German is just clock, so I filed it under "vaguely sexual, possibly involving timepieces" and never looked further. It didn’t matter. She could have been singing about anything. I was hooked on the texture, not the semantics.

Now it’s late 2009 and Uffie is still singing the same song. Or singing it again—because Ed Banger has finally released an official video for it, years after any reasonable release window would have closed. A friend named Sara noticed this too, with a bewilderment I completely understand.

And the thing is, the video earns it. It’s loud and colorful and slightly unhinged—somewhere between Sébastien Tellier’s Kilometer and Flathead by The Fratellis, that specific register of fever-dream visual sugar. The song deserved exactly this. Which might be the problem. There’s a version of Uffie that existed in a particular underground corner—uncommercial, half-formed, passed between people who felt like they’d found something. A slick official video is step one toward losing that. Unfortunately.