Exclusive Video Premiere: The Black Lips' Animated Psych-Out "Short Fuse"

When Rolling Stone chatted with Black Lips drummer Joe Bradley last month, he said that on 200 Million Thousand (due out Tuesday), the Atlanta garage-rock band would be playing Miss Cleo and doing a little prognosticating. "We're predicting the future," he said. "Just general predictions, like violence in Europe and the assassination of a figurehead." But the cartoon video for the album's "Short Fuse" — which Bradley directed — looks back to the past, according to Chris Taylor, who animated the psychedelic clip. " 'Short Fuse' is an homage to American and Japanese cartoons from the '60s and '70s," he says. "The series of events in the video are a literal representation of the song's lyrics."

The video is packed with retro charm, and is indeed quite literal (the lyric "Hey, Mr. Postman" is accompanied by a mailman). There's marching sticks of TNT, a cracked-up Humpty Dumpty flying through trippy squares of color and even little cartoon versions of the band — click above to check out it out, and if you're sensitive to seizure-inducing Japanese anime, beware around the three-quarter point.

Rolling Stone's newest critic, Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump, reviewed 200 Million Thousand in the new issue, writing that the sloppy punks honor their garage heroes like the 13th Floor Elevators and New York Dolls on the LP. When RS previewed the disc, we noted the album's awesome combo of chunky riffs and ragged howls — and that "Body Combat" features a snippet from a song recorded in France in 1860 that may be historic. "I think it's the first song ever recorded," Bradley said. "[Guitarist] Cole [Alexander] found it on the Internet, and he liked the 'woo-woo' sound."

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Song Stories

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz | 2008

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."

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