New Video: Antony And The Johnsons Cover of Beyonce's 'Crazy In Love'

Here is the new official video for Antony and the Johnson's cover of Beyonce's "Crazy In Love." (Many live videos have been floating about for a while.) Pretty much a note-for-note carbon copy of the original.

Just kidding! In fact, it should be written into the publishing-rights agreement for any and all cover songs henceforth recorded that the covering artist watch this video first. Antony achieves what all cover songs should aspire to: taking a structural template and changing it in tone so that it delivers a new and different emotional impact.

Replacing Beyonce's towering walls of brass and percussion with understated piano and violin, Antony transforms a frantic, exuberant celebration of love's ability to change us into a meditation on how the unrequited version can pitch us into deep despair. A transformation of a song about transformation. A perfect choice for Antony, who has, musically at least, transformed himself very profoundly-from man to woman, and back again, and somewhere in the middle.

The video goes from smoky, surveillance-style footage of a tanning chamber to a studio set with what look like fake plants. It's strange and affecting. But is Antony in blackface at the end of the video? I don't know. Kinda looks like it. If so, that's heavy transformation. And that's crazy all right.

Anyway: gorgeous.