Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

Unlike the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” video, “New Vogue Riche” smacks of Molly’s own aesthetic, and despite the record company’s minimal involvement, it serves as a sharp marker of her new power within the music industry and her label in particular. “New Vogue Riche” begins where “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” left off, with Molly running up the giant staircase. At the top of the stairs, Molly’s costume transforms into a bodysuit outfitted with panels of LED lights.

Ali follows Molly up the stairs, and they find abandoned rooms, the furniture covered with white sheets. During the first verse, while Molly sings about wanting to be Madonna when she was a little girl, Molly rips the sheets off couches and statues. She throws the white fabric, billowing, to Ali, who uses them as props in Parker’s ballet-inflected choreography.

After the first chorus (“When I get money [New!] / I throw a party [Vogue!] / For everybody [Riche!] / New. Vogue. Riche. Dance.”), Molly uncovers a miniature skyscraper, the size of a child’s playhouse. As Molly removes the tarp, the skyscraper’s little windows glow purple. Molly wraps herself around the skyscraper, humping and licking it, and generally acting like a sexed-up King Kong. vAfter a verse, a door on the side of the skyscraper springs open.

Dropping to her hands and knees, Molly Metropolis crawls into the skyscraper, with Ali at her heels. Molly then finds herself in a seemingly empty city, her costume transformed again, this time into a jet-black leotard with metallic sleeves. The map travels off the leotard and, in body paint, across Molly’s arms, legs, neck and face. Molly gazes at the sky, where the words Molly’s Metropolis dangle, a purple neon light attached to nothing in particular. In the giant neon words, all the O’s are rendered as small triangles, conforming to the visual ascetics associated with the ’80s-style Outrun Electro genre Molly détourns for many of her tracks.

A few quick cuts later, Molly’s dancers come tumbling out of doorways and join Molly and Ali in the street. Molly dances energetically with the group through a few iterations of the chorus. The video ends with Molly beginning to explore her city.

The “New Vogue Riche” music video received the best critical response of any of her videos and remains a fan favorite. I’m inclined to agree with the popular sentiment. The video is playful and fun, the choreography is top-notch, and the visuals are striking thanks to Benoît Debie’s candy-colored, glow-y cinematography.

Molly’s video for “Apocalypse Dance” was the third chapter of this saga, and ended in a cliffhanger. Because Molly disappeared, the cliffhanger was never resolved.

Molly invited Berliner to Los Angeles to sync their maps and to visit the set of “New Vogue Riche”; he pretended to be an old friend from high school whom she had met at summer camp. While on set, he met and hit it off with one of Molly’s dancers, Irene Davis. The two immediately began dating.

Molly and her team shot the video over three days, from August 31 to September 2, 2008, during a particularly exciting time for Molly Metropolis and her General Council; “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” was quickly climbing the charts and Cause Célèbrety had debuted earlier in the month to larger than expected sales figures. The dancers, Parker, and even the film crew, who had no long-term vested interest in Molly’s career, felt the energy and excitement on set. In between takes, the production assistants played LCD Soundsystem and M.I.A., and the dancers developed little dance moves for “Paper Planes.” For the first time since Molly was dropped from her first label, she felt happy and secure in her career. In the minutes before the shoot began, she wept with happiness in front of the whole crew, then apologized to the makeup assistants for making them reapply her mascara. Molly was so emotionally overwhelmed, she didn’t realize her hold on Ali had begun to unravel.

Without Peaches around to help, the weight of Molly’s intensity fell on Ali alone. She treated Ali passionately, but roughly. She had always done so. For example, in an early interview with MTV VJ Nani Cook, when Cook worked up the nerve to awkwardly question Molly about her “friends,” Molly answered, benignly, that they were her “followers and dancers.” Then she grabbed Ali’s jaw and shook her face. Ali didn’t otherwise move or react, but unedited footage of the interview shows Peaches gasping as it happened. wCook quickly moved on to other topics. Ali thought about that moment often in the weeks leading up to the “New Vogue Riche” shoot, when Molly’s ferocity reached a fever pitch. Without Peaches there to help normalize the way Molly treated her, Ali realized that moment defined her relationship with Molly. Ali didn’t like that she had done nothing while Molly moved her. She felt like she was always standing perfectly still while Molly Metropolis shook her face.

For the “New Vogue Riche” video, Molly asked Parker to leave part of the bridge — a repetition of the couplet “all you nouveau / do the new vogue” layered over pulsating ’80s-style synths — unchoreographed, so she could freestyle with Ali. With the cameras rolling, Molly told Ali to sit with her knees up and Molly draped herself over Ali’s legs. Molly pressed the front of her body against Ali’s legs, arching into her, and tightly wrapped her hands around Ali’s thighs, while Ali performed a modified version of Madonna’s famous arm choreography from the “Vogue” music video. Then Molly mimed a gun, pointed it at Ali’s head, and pretended to fire. Ali recoiled, then gracefully fluttered down, until she was lying on her back. Molly slithered over her body, then sprung up to standing and performed the Vogue-like arm choreography herself — she’d mimed killing Ali and stealing her dance moves.

The theatrical violence shook Ali. Although she knew Molly Metropolis wasn’t actually trying to hurt her, she had a sinking fear that her relationship with Molly was toxic. Molly had already started telling Ali her ideas for her next batch of songs; she called it her “album for the end of the world” and Ali, in turn, started to see Molly as a world-ender. She found herself in the precarious position of being a monster’s henchman.

Skendarian shot Molly and Ali’s violent dance on the first day of “New Vogue Riche” filming. After Skendarian wrapped shooting, a vulnerable Ali sought out Molly’s company. She suggested a late night spa treatment at the hotel, or maybe glasses of Scotch in the suite, but Molly told Ali she needed to spend her evening working alone with Berliner. With conspiratorial glee, Molly told Ali that she had a surprise for him: she had digitized the last of the L maps and The Ghost Network was complete. Ali took strong note of Molly’s wording, “working alone with Berliner,” and “a surprise for Berliner”—as if Ali’s involvement in The Ghost Network project meant nothing. For Ali, that was the last straw. She thought Molly considered her nothing more than a weight-bearing column, someone to lean on, but not someone who could contribute. She planned her defection. x

Berliner and Molly drank champagne and toasted the completion of The Ghost Network, calling it the first step in the discovery of the New Situationists’ agenda. Meanwhile, Ali called Peaches. Ali aired her grievances with Metro; Peaches reiterated some of her own. Each girl allowed the other’s negative energy to intensify her own frustration. By the end of the conversation, Peaches begged Ali to quit and move back to New York. Ali had a better idea.

“Peaches and I did a lot of work without a lot of real thanks,” Ali told me in our first interview, unapologetic and still angry, just like Peaches, despite the two years that had gone by since Molly disappeared. “Metro was appreciative, sometimes, but she didn’t let us in and neither of us was satisfied with doing the work without getting to participate in what came next. I could’ve just left, but that would’ve been turning my back on all the time I’d spent collecting information. I believed, and I don’t think I was wrong, that Peaches and I earned the gold at the end of the rainbow just as much as she and Nick did. None of us knew what we were looking for, so it didn’t seem like she deserved it more than us. She didn’t.”