“Statuette” is the third glimpse of Metric/Broken Social Scene singer Emily Haines’ sophomore album Choir of the Mind under the Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton stage name. Haines’ intimate and melodic vocals breeze along pleasantly on the track, backed by a summery and laid back bossa nova production. Upon closer listening, however, you learn that Haines is more preoccupied with the power inequality between high-powered, critically acclaimed men (someone like Woody Allen or Casey Affleck, perhaps) and the relatively powerless women who are seduced by their power: ‘ The statuette on your shelf/ Says you're better than me’.
The disarmingly charming chorus lends an eco-feminist subtext to Haines’ reading of this power imbalance, linking the exploitation of natural resources and turning a blind eye to moral qualms with the source of capitalist patriarchal power:
‘With all the coal in the core
All the water and the oil
You can buy any girl in the world
With the soil that you borrow
And the moral you deny
You can buy the eyes of the world’
Lyrics: Genius
As Haines revealed to Stereogum, the accompanying low-resolution music video was yet another product of her collaboration with visual artist Justin Broadbent. Haines is featured in an uncomfortable casting couch scenario, where she is asked to take off her shirt – like all the other girls auditioning for the part – to achieve her artistic aspirations:
"We replicated a sleazy audition taping where the objectified woman's value is reduced to the commercial desirability of her flesh. In the video, I get to reclaim myself and own it in the end. It was one of the weirder shoots I've done, acting out that humiliation, conforming to the lowered standards of all the other girls who so desperately want the part”.
