Some songs are made for radio. They’re just catchy enough that you can bury anything in there and people will happily sing along to them. Make it uplifting, and they’ll belt it out righteously in their car. Carmel Mikol released the video for ‘Hold’ from her new album ‘Daughter Of A Working Man’ today, and the only way we’re going to find out if it’s an anthem is to sing it together.
We’ve got a hard and fast rule around here that lyric videos don’t fly. The lyric video is the music video equivalent of tofu. Sure, it’s there and it’s getting the job done. We can’t help but mash that giant play button regardless of whatever is at the other end of it. The internet knows that we’ve been conditioned, and it has engineered an endless stream to accommodate it, but it’s not what you’d ever call satisfying.
Exceptions can be made though, and Carmel Mikol’s ‘Hold’ is exceptional. Produced by Jon Landry, frontman of The Stanfields, ‘Hold’ stands out as a catchy protest song wrapped in an anthem. If this had come out fifteen years ago it would have been Sheryl Crow singing this song. You can practically see the crowds singing along to it, eyes closed, arms in the air, standing in their soft seater rows.
The video does in fact feature a whole lot of typography slinging, which is fine, particularly because of the footage paired with it. Where the song is a sort of rallying cry for us to acknowledge our similarities in the face the adversity, the video highlights some of the cheerier moments of several serious protests. From civil rights to climate change, everything gets in there, but throughout it all it looks like people are enjoying themselves. It glosses over a lot of the harsher realities but ultimately we all just want to get along and be happy anyway, right? Oh, and to maybe not die in some tsunami. Thanks for that, peer reviewed science!