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Let‰’s take a little trip back to 2012: the year of “Call Me Maybe,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” and, yes, “Gangnam Style.” Oh, what a year in music.

But, at the end of that glorious year came a song that would usher in a new age, the year of the dragon. Imagine Dragons, that is.

I‰’m pretty sure everyone knows “Radioactive.” If not, you probably haven‰’t listened to the radio in decades, and I‰’m sorry for your loss. “Radioactive‰” is, in simple terms, the ultimate dystopian theme song that you want playing as you ride into battle to defeat the evil dictator. Yes, it‰’s that epic.

Its music video? Not so much.

When I first pictured the video in my head (am I the only one who comes up with potential video ideas while listening to music?), I was thinking of a post-apocalyptic aesthetic: hero vs. villain, dark colors, special effects, maybe some cool superpowers, basically an action movie condensed into four minutes.

In some sense, the music video was all that and more. But the more part involved stuffed animal fighting.

Yes, you read that right. Stuffed animals fighting.

And I only really have one question about this concept: why? Why this? To this day, I have little clue about what the song is really about, but nothing in my wildest dreams involved it translating into stuffed animals going head to head while the band is trapped in a dungeon under the arena. Is it a metaphor for how purity and goodness will always win over greed and business? A statement about how underdogs defeat obstacles? A showcase of how amazing Dan Reynolds looks while hitting that beautifully oversized drum (this theory can actually be confirmed by watching the live performance of this song)? These are concepts that eighteen-year-old me just came up with to try to grapple with the fact that maybe, just maybe, this video has some meaning to it. Fourteen-year-old-me from 2012 would have just said, “I hate this.”

Though, according to Reynolds, this is the exact reaction they were looking for. In an interview with MTV, he said that the band wanted to shy away from the post-apocalyptic ideas everyone was having and present something completely different. He went on to say,

“’Radioactive,’ to me, it’s very masculine, powerful-sounding song, and the lyrics behind it, there’s a lot of personal story behind it, but generally speaking, it’s a song about having an awakening; kind of waking up one day and deciding to do something new, and see life in a fresh way. A lot of people hear it in a dark way, but, I think, without saying the word too many times, it’s empowering, and so we wanted to display that in a way that the listener wouldn’t see normally.‰Û

So, my rant aside, I can see the redeemable aspects of presenting the video in the way they did. It did make them stand out in the mainstream crowd and create a unique story to generate speculation and interest. It‰’s what makes Imagine Dragons Imagine Dragons. You can imagine whatever you want. And that‰’s what makes it art, and art shouldn‰’t be easily explained.

But I‰’m still bitter about the stuffed animals.