Raleigh Ritchie could have easily cruised on his good looks and emotive voice when he threw his hat in the ring of contemporary pop singers. God knows most of his music peers coast on less. But from the start his lyrics have been both left of center and nakedly intimate, delivered with go for broke intensity. Likewise, his videos have been ambitiously cinematic in terms of visual style and with regards to the acting performances he’s given in them. The musician who turned actor (Grey Worm on Games of Thrones) to pay the bills is what they used to refer to as a triple-threat.
While fans continue to pine for his long delayed album, Ritchie keeps dropping EPs, singled and videos that remind us he’s in the running to be the preeminent global pop star of the moment. A few months ago he dropped the clip for “Bloodsport ‘15 (Part 1)” the lushly overhauled track that originally appeared on the 2013 EP Black and Blue. He’s just dropped the clip for Part 2 of the video tale, and it’s an over-the-top violent love story in which boy meets girl at the receiving end of a rifle, but before they connect he drops a host of bodies in the local park: pallbearers carrying a coffin, senior citizens, young lovers, a blind man out for a walk with his dog – but, notably, the dog is left to live another day. It carries forth the thread of madness from Part 1.
The concept is both a literal and playful take on the notion of love being a bloodsport, but the video also further dismantles the reflex to cast Ritchie’s persona as that of the sensitive brooding young man quietly eating his insides. Listening to his music sans the video images he’s connected to them could easily lead you to concoct an isolated figure nursing his broken poetic heart in a dark room somewhere. Many of his non-performance videos show characters that flirt with madness, that are bruised loners. Ritchie’s videos blur the line between the sensitive young man and the one who is going of has gone stark raving mad. In doing so, he heads off any inclination to see him as a pretty boy with a broken heart and – with tongue in cheek – goes for something darker and (in the new clip) morbidly funny.
