[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/JXbLyi5wgeg]
Pulp’s 6½-min. pop dirge is a lament for blowing out your serotonin pathways with too much sex, drugs and idolatry. A literal-minded video might have riffed amusingly on Boogie Nights or revisited the soft-core anhedonia of Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” promo. But director Doug Nichol goes a more metaphoric route, with a glittering daisy chain of set pieces: a noir interlude in a private investigator’s office, luscious simulacra of midcentury Hollywood melodramas, a fistfight amid Danish modern furniture at a swank cocktail party, plus a trip to a Busby Berkeley afterlife. What makes the images cohere is their impeccable fakeness: this is life and art experienced from an icy distance at conspicuous expense, conjuring the song’s ambience of hollow, corrupted glamour.