Artist and filmmaker Ambar Navarro (Film/Video BFA 15) directs Los Angeles-based punk quartet The Paranoyds’ latest music video for their surfy feminist anthem Girlfriend Degree.
“Getting a ‘girlfriend degree’ is about settling, selling oneself short—valuing your partner’s beliefs or opinions over your own,” The Paranoyds stated in a June 2019 Paper Magazine profile. “It’s cool to be a girlfriend or wife or whatever, but there’s so much more to being a woman than that.”
Girlfriend Degree is the first single from The Paranoyds’ upcoming debut album Carnage Bargain, to be released Friday, September 13 by Suicide Squeeze Records.
Replete with glossy, candy-colored visuals reminiscent of early aughts teen films, Barbie-fueled interstitials and an ominously smoking toilet, Navarro crafts a vision of a sleepover gone nightmarish. Each of the female band members doze off, depicted in their dreamscapes as dolls. Keyboardist Laila Hashemi cruises down the highway in a white convertible with a LOOKSKILL vanity plate before plunging off a cliff. Bassist, guitarist and vocalist Lexi Funston sweats over and ultimately fails an exam (presumably for the “girlfriend degree”). Frontwoman Staz Lindes is upstaged at her own concert by a Ken doll, before Hashemi, Funston and drummer David Ruiz knock him off the stage and rock out with Lindes to reclaim the audience’s attention.
Navarro previously lent her directorial savvy to CalArtian punk trio Moaning’s Tired. She also collaborated with fellow CalArtian director Tempe Hale (Film/Video MFA 14) for Detroit-based artist Stef Chura’s Speeding Ticket music video.