Geoff Boothby | Zeppelin / 2014 [music video]

story vs. sensation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eli Lieb (lyricist and composer), Geoff Boothby (director) Zeppelin / 2014 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

When I began covering music videos in My Queer Cinema, I determined that even if the artist was gay and well-know for his or her queer-based songs if there were no images of a queer other, and if that song might have as easily been interpreted as a heterosexual love song, I would not include it. That particularly effects several gay artists who make it clear that they want to cross-over, or widen their audiences to include, in the case of gay male artists like Eli Lieb, female fans. Shangri La, his 2017 single is just such a piece. It consists only of a partially nude Lieb in a bath tube and occasionally seen drying off through a partially opaque glass bathroom door. Yes there is a sort of male dubbed answer to his shouts of how he “caves in” each time they kiss, the voice could be (and probably) is an electronically manipulated version of Lieb’s own voice, and although those who know his work, as I now do, will be sufficiently convinced that he is singing of a male and of queer love, there is no literal manifestation of gay love, only its suggestion.

     Of course, I’ve accepted simple coding hints in earlier short and, particularly, feature films throughout these volumes. But I feel that when it is a gay artist who will not fully clarify to whom he’s singing that it alters the situation, shifting what is likely a queer story into a possibly heterosexual one, reversing the very process of films which under the code were not allowed to represent homosexual behavior but whose creators nonetheless went out of their way to hint of it. Here the composer of director almost erases any connection to queer love.

     Lieb’s own comments about his writing process are fascinating in this context. First of all, he admits to what I have often criticized him for, his simple and rather pleasing but absolutely unchallenging pop tunes.

      Interviewed by Curtis M. Wong in The Huffington Post, Lieb almost adamantly declares his pop roots:

 

“I write pop songs; that’s really where my strength is. Zeppelin is a straight-down-the-middle, pop-rock song, and some of them get a little more indie sounding. It’s a good mixture of pop and that…”

 

     Asked by Wong how sexuality affects his work as an artist and a musician, Lieb clearly hedges, and makes precisely the demarcations:

 

“It doesn’t impact my work as an artist at all. The only moment when it does is when it comes time to film a video, I’m like, “Oh! I have to have a guy in this, because it’s a love song and that’s accurate to my life.”

     But when I actually write music … the creative process has nothing to do with my sexuality other than the fact that I can get entangled with people in the same way that anybody can get entangled with a person. When I think of myself, my sexuality isn’t the defining part of who I am as a musician. I haven’t written about the struggles of being gay because I’ve personally never felt that.”

 

    Yet, I would argue that a work such as Shangri La is actually more of a love song that is the second work he mentions, Zeppelin. The difference is that the first is all about sensation, while Zeppelin, like Steve Grand’s All-American Boy, with whom Wong compares him and asks for his reaction, is a narrative work. In order to tell his story, he needs the tools of cinema, actors in the plural, location, and camera work that does more than focus on Lieb as a pretty boy in the bathroom.

     Zeppelin may not be musically challenging, but as a narrative if focuses something that most musical videos never have, male cruising, and car sex.

     Lieb’s lyrics make the subject quite clear from the very first stanzas of his song:

 

“T-shirt and jeans I got some wheels

I'll take you where you want to go

I know a place we can park

where you can play every note on your air guitar

'Cause I gotta black dog feeling

drumming on the steering wheel

Singing in the car with you to zeppelin

on this perfect endless night

Trying to build our own stairway to heaven

yeah I've never felt so high

You turn it up we scream along

Take all my love

a summer night with you and zeppelin”

 

    The zeppelin is used as a metaphor here not only for getting high on the sensations of sex but because with its “rigid body, with a long cylindrical shape” (the Oxford Dictionary definition) it resembles a cock. The air guitar, usually referring to an imaginary guitar, in urban street meanings represents, once again, the cock or vagina being fellated. In short, the story demanded another male to play out Lieb’s concerns.

     The sex was so great that by the fifth stanza he’s frustrated that he now sits alone without the pick-up of the summer night, leaving him only with the memories of

 

“Singing in the car with you to zeppelin

on this perfect endless night

Trying to build our own stairway to heaven

yeah I've never felt so high

You turn it up we scream along

Take all my love

a summer night with you and zeppelin”

 

     The images, meanwhile, make it clear that his former car-mate has gone off with someone else.

     In short, the narrative changes everything, not only making a far more interesting musical work than simply forcing the singer to “cave” every time he kisses his lover, but taking us back, like Grand’s memorable work, to a specific summer night when everything went right and he had perfect auto sex, perhaps never to repeated again. Like Grand’s All-American Boy, Lieb’s 2014 Zeppelin is a work about youth, memory, nostalgia, and most of all cinematic story-telling, while the later Shangri-La is only about his inability to resist to his lover’s kisses, an act represented by his rolling-around in the bath.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).