Listen In Shock And Awe To The Daggiest Rap-Ballad About Road Safety
If your local road safety video doesn't include Power Ballad Jesus releasing a CGI dove, do you even care about pedestrians?
Serious art critics will invariably tell you that the highest form of art is the local council road safety awareness video. If you don’t believe me, you will once you’ve seen North Sydney Council’s latest pedestrian awareness effort.
Usually this is where I’d set the scene, but in this case, the video’s done it for me: it opens with some fancy drone footage of North Sydney, making sure the viewer knows right from the get-go that we’re talking about a wealthy local council here, one with drones. Shortly after this, actor Jon Vontolken appears on screen to sadly croon a power ballad about a better world, one where pedestrians are not rushing.
This quickly becomes boring, so comedian Fran Middleton appears to save the day with some fairly pedestrian (ha, get it) rap about how to not get hit by a bus. “Human beings all together on the north side, got brains, common sense to use,” she informs us. “So better switch on your street smarts, or a bus will [bus honks] and you’ll lose.”
From this point onwards, the video becomes like that saying about an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Power Ballad Guy remains determined to prophesy utopian futures while turning his head slowly and thus more meaningfully; meanwhile, our rapper comedian is also determined to keep spitting nuggets of wisdom such as “yeah, get off that median strip”. In a kind of compromise, or perhaps because neither will back down, they just both continue to do their thing at once, as a montage of pedestrians crossing the road plays in the background.
In a particularly moving scene, Middleton tells us that “green means go, red means stop”, as Vontolken inexplicably whispers “I love you” and tearfully releases a poorly CGI’d dove into the sky. Standing there with his long hair, throwing doves around and crying about dead pedestrians, he actually cuts a pretty Jesus-like aesthetic. It’s moving, I guess, if you’re into that.
Mostly it’s just extremely entertaining, the kind of thing I’d personally be tempted to watch on my smartphone while sprinting wildly through traffic without looking. I guess North Sydney Council didn’t think that one through, hey?
Anyway, you can watch the full video below if you want to have a truly rollicking Friday arvo. Just please don’t actually watch it while crossing the road. In the immortal words of North Sydney Council: don’t die.