Music Video
The music video for the song is directed by Tony Gardner. While rather low-budget, the video for "The Prime Time of Your Life" contains several images which can be considered graphically disturbing. At the video's start one can see a swiveling skull moving its jaw. The camera then zooms out revealing that it is a reflection in an eye. The eye blinks and one can see a head of a girl watching television. Everyone on the television is shown as a living skeleton in various modes on different programs. Daft Punk makes a cameo appearance in the music video as skeletons being interviewed by a news station on the television.
The girl walks over to her dresser and looks at several photographs. She sees her parents, who are also living skeletons, triggering flashbacks revealing a necklace of some importance. She then looks at a picture of herself (in which she is not a skeleton and appears overweight) playing jump-rope with her friends who are skeletons. The girl goes into the bathroom where she is seen in the mirror with a skeletal rendition of Britney Spears (the cover image of her greatest hits album) in the reflection. The girl proceeds to take off the necklace and lays it on the sink, then opens a drawer where she discovers a razor blade.
She slits her right hand with the blade (no blood appears). With her other hand she pulls the skin off her right hand. In the next shot she begins to cut the skin around her face, then proceeds to tear off the skin so that her head, torso and arms are skinless. She stares at herself and she gets flashbacks of her life then faints.
The girl's parents, who do not appear as skeletons, find their daughter lying on the bathroom floor (the viewer can only see her legs). The camera then shows the photos on the dresser again but this time everyone appears normal. The picture of the girl with her friends is also different, and the girl is not overweight. In the final shot of the video the girl is shown on the television, as a skeleton, waving at two skeletons holding a jump-rope.
The music video was included with the CD/DVD version of the album Musique Vol. 1 1993–2005.
Read more about this topic: The Prime Time Of Your Life
Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets—we remember only.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)