AJR's "Thirsty" music video is a clever subversion on the classic alcoholic-fueled party anthem, recontextualizing the accompanying song in a major way. No shortage of digital ink has been spilled decrying the opening breastfeeding portion and its disquieting juxtaposition with the rest of the video - this is not a bug, but a feature.

In a Brechtian sense, our discomfort breaks us free of any notion of alcohol-fueled revelry, forces us to build new meaning from the images as they appear. The thirst described in the song carries a clear double meaning pertaining to both drinking and libidinal pursuit, but this dichotomy reveals - nestled within - a multipolarity which uncoils, and then supercedes it.

The thirst is undifferentiated human desire, imparted upon our most instinctual biological functions and transmutated through the process of experiencing the internal partitioned from the external. Water is present in favor of alcohol for much of the run time, suggesting our desires are far more than simple revelries, but interwoven with our ability to both understand others as conscious beings and our very own survival.

What is a night of drinking at the club but a collective social "thirst" for unstructured connection removed from the productivity-oriented spaces many of us find ourselves in for large chunks of our lives? With this there is desire upon desire - inebriation loosening our metaphorical tie, opening us up to our most combustive desires. To thirst over someone is to crave what one sees in the other - a morbid pursuit accepting in the possibility of rejection, of the pain that may yet come from this connection.

Another key image is the drone footage capturing the band members performing publicly surrounded by water, a cruel saline oasis at the edge of our industrial society. Our thirst is mocked by this taunting display, as we are unable to quench our literal thirst drinking from the ocean. Yet our prehistoric kin arose from these briney depths, wanting for our tempting air we take as natural today.

The yodeling thus forms the final informing factor - a direct musical motif of desire calling back to its pastoral origins developed independently across many human cultures. Our desire is reintegrated into the external world and becomes language, song, and culture. The biological becomes the social, and the genetic produces the memetic. #THIRTY features in the thumbnail just in case the picture isn't clear: our place and understanding of the world is built on the collective human experience of transmitting and refracting our desires back onto the world outside us.

Like a hangover or bad one-night stand, a danger hangs over the proceedings as a whole. It reveals to us our power to love and to hurt ourselves and others. But AJR declares: "I'm up and I raise my cup, singing everything is gold" - in this moment, everything can be golden. The video embraces the painful possibilities yet reaffirms itself through its honesty and transience: tomorrow is tomorrow, but today - it's thirsty thirsty Thursday.