So 3005 was a great video, along with all of his other BTI music videos/short films. I liked them all for the most part. Hiro Murai is a badass with cinematography. Anyways, I will start with the basics.

The viewer sees that Donald is on a ferris wheel with a teddy bear (who personally reminds me of Kanye’s bear from College dropout and moreso Late Registration) for what appears to be a very long time. Everything around him gets older and older, until (I’m guessing a bit here) everything looks like a barren wasteland, possibly describing the year 3005, “The year that we fear only god will survive”. And then it cuts to Zealots of Stockholm where everything is dead/on fire and an ominous figure (who everyone here is just assuming is Donald) is standing in the middle of it.

That is the basic plot of the video. But there is obviously a bit more to it than that.

I’m going to start off my more detailed and confusing analysis with the ferris wheel. A ferris wheel has always been seen (in a more symbolic view) as the “life cycle” or the “circle of life”. Don is pretty much going through life, along with the other people who you can see some small snippets of during the video who are getting older, until the end where everything is dead. I think that the reason we don’t see Don getting older is

because it would be extremely difficult to get different actors who look exactly like Donald, just a bit older or it could have to do with his overall lack of care this entire time, how he isn’t changing at all and is instead just leading a stagnant and dull lifestyle, similarly to how the Boy in the Because the Internet screenplay sees his life as useless because nobody will ever remember him after he dies. This idea really links to the theme of the song, seeing that in the year 3005, nothing is remembered because nobody is alive to remember the events. In another perspective on life, things die when people stop remembering them, so if there are no people left to remember anything, then everything is truly dead. This leads up to the idea of the “what’s the point?” thought. “None of us want to die without anyone caring or remembering us”.

A similarity I noticed in the 3005 video, I don’t know if it has any significance, but at this point, Don mysteriously and suddenly leaves the ferris wheel, or symbolically dies in my weird take on this video. Another way to think of it is that he is cheating, or getting out of the commitment to being on the ferris wheel. Donald raps alot on BTI about commitments, and how he is super afraid of them, so it fits right into the album. Another video where the exact same thing happens is the music video for Radiohead’s Karma Police. In the video (which is extremely well put together), a car appears to have been chasing a man for a long period of time, while the lead singer sits in the back and sings the lyrics “this is what you get”. The idea of the video (I think) is that you sympathize with the man being chased, and that he doesn’t deserve to be chased. In the end of the video, the man who is being chased manages to light the car on fire, and kills everyone in the car (hence the title). Except the singer dude is just gone. I see a lot of similarity between these 2 scenes, and here are both of them for comparison. I suggest you watch the full video to Karma Police as well, it is awesome.

3005



Karma Police