I discovered this on youtube, and could not help but start laughing.
This post is more about the music video than the music itself (which is not that interesting or recent). Unfortunably I did not find the names of the people doing the cover and acting in the video.
You can watch the original version by Robert Palmer (1985) here: Robert Palmer - Addicted to Love
Robert Palmer’s inapproachable girls, dressed in black, playing instruments (though it is clear that these models are there only for the show) are converted to girls in a chemical laboratory and made ridiculous. Here, women wearing exactly the same dress are a common sight, and the singer imitates Palmer’s 30’s style with tie and white shirt by wearing a white lab coat.
Palmer’s attractive girls suggest the fact that no man could ever reach them in their kind of aristocracy, if that is the right word. On the other side, the attractiveness of women in lab clothes is limited, I have to confess. Even the moves of the girls match the original and thereby add “authenticity” to the cover. Some elements of the lyrics are kept and transferred to the chemical context, especially:
“It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get/add enough”
It is not common covering / parodizing music and video at the same time. The style of Palmer’s video has been cited by other artists as can be read on wikipedia. Also, the video hints at the works of Patrick Nagel, an artist who did drawings of women in a similar style and could be a possible influence to these music videos.
As I am no more much into chemistry, I can only summarize what is described in the lyrics of the cover:
A substance is supposed to deprotonate (= lose its hydrogen). To achieve this, a base must be added, in solution there are OH- -ions (these are addicted to protones, pulling them like magnetic) so the reaction (in solution) should be:
H₃O+ + OH- >> 2H₂O
That is a kind of neutralisation, and if it is finished, the pH should be around 7 as no more protones/charge should be there. As the song title implies, it’s resistant to base, this reaction does not happen and the desperate researcher adds huge amounts of base pushing the pH to the limit.
As you see, music can lead to various other topics at the same time like chemistry or history of art.
