A new music video from folk rock band Whiskey Shivers has taken Reddit and YouTube by storm—and left people wondering about its morbid ending.
The video for “Gimme All Your Lovin’” features all five band members stuck together like a giant human centipede, playing their instruments, while fiddler Bobby Fitzgerald, 23, has his face caressed by a bevy of young women.
Near the end of the video, the camera pans down the monster’s body and reveals a basement full of dead girls. The startling scene inspired a psychoanalytical debate on Reddit where it collected more than 1,000 comments and reached Thursday’s front page.
For example, redditor yellephant suggested that Fitzgerald’s character was a “schizophrenic psychopath who harbors the personalities of a number of musically-gifted misogynists.” By using his musical talents, he was able to charm women into his grasp. Those who tried to leave were killed, yellephant wrote.
Redditor Mispelling called the video a “poignant feminist allegory on the sexual habits of young men in the United States.”
“Having all of the men in one shirt represents that all men are the same and that all of the want the same thing: They all want sexual relations with all women. All of the arms reaching in represent all of the various sexual encounters that a man in his late 20s/early 30s might experience,” Mispelling wrote. “The women are not entire people, just something to please the man. And after he has received all the pleasure he can derive from the faceless women, he discards them.”
Those theories aren’t far off base: According to video director Robert Wadleigh, 24, the dead girls symbolize the man’s lovers who don’t give him all their loving; he ends up killing them.
But really, it was just for shock value, he said.
“I felt there needed to be some kind of closing slammer at the end of the video, where you’re like, ‘holy shit,’” Wadleigh said.
“Gimme All Your Lovin’” is the first music video from the two-year-old quintet out of Austin, Texas. It was shot in May on a $500 budget at a recycling warehouse in Austin. About 20 people, including the band, met there twice a week for a month to shoot the piece. And in blazing summer heat with no air conditioning, this was no easy task, Fitzgerald said.
“It was really intense. A lot of work,” Fitzgerald said in an interview with the Daily Dot. “Having it come together in the end was an incredible thing.”
(The heat goes far to explain Fitzgerald’s intense perspiration, which comes across as nervous sweat in the video.)
In order to create the giant, plaid-clad monster, Wadleigh had the musicians lie down on top of each other. It was only way to achieve the effect, he said.
“There was no way to get that fluidity if we shot it up and down. I wanted it to be super, super fluid,” Wadleigh said. “I also thought it would be really tiring and possibly dangerous for the band to do that. So I was like, we got to do it on the ground.”
The set was created by the entire band and their friends under the direction of Kelsey Wilson, 21. Wilson was responsible for creating the long plaid shirt worn by the band to create the human centipede illusion.
“We didn’t know if if was going to work at all,” Wilson said. “The biggest problem was the measurements at the shoulders and figuring out where their arms were going to be exactly. …At first we tried to keep the whole body padded and make it look like one continuous thing but after 10 hours in a hot warehouse with them stuffed inside this one shirt—sweating and gross—it got harder and harder to care.”
The music video was released last week to help promote the bands upcoming album “Batholith” and a tour which starts Aug. 30 in Austin, Wadleigh said.
All of the attention the video has received really caught the band off guard.
“I got a call from a friend and he said, ‘Your video is on Reddit.’ And I said, ‘Whoa, that’s awesome. What’s Reddit?’” Fitzgerald said. “To put something together like this and have people respond to it. It’s really exciting.”