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Odd Future Are to Blame for Nelly Furtado’s ‘Big Hoops’

If you watched the Billboard Music Awards two weekends ago, you might’ve been weirded out by Nelly Furtado’s glow-in-the-dark, Native American rave-meets-Cirque du Soleil performance of her most recent single, “Big Hoops (Bigger the Better).” The single, a far cry from “Maneater” and basically the psychotic evil twin of “I’m Like a Bird,” may be an ear-stabbing (pun intended) homage to over-large earrings, but as Furtado has now told MTV, her love of excess isn’t the only thing the world should blame for the song’s existence.

“The state of mind I was in… I think I was listening to Odd Future or something, and I was inspired by how dark it sounded and how heavy and visceral and how it made your blood feel things,” she said in the on-camera interview, below, after inferring that loving one’s jewelry is a metaphor for loving oneself. “And I just thought, ‘Wow — that’s really missing in music. We’re missing that rawness, that energy and that power.’ “

The video for “Big Hoops” features neither coked-up centaurs nor weird man-babies, but maybe she’s saving those appearances for the next single.