His music has been described as emotional and intimate but also distant, and he has always obscured himself from his fans.
In the video, he obscures himself: male and female models lip-synch his vocals, and the leather jacket from the "Faith" video is set on fire.
The British music historian Edward Lockspeiser, in his important biography of Debussy published in 1936 and updated several times, gets at the essence of the man and the artist when he suggests that Debussy "obscured himself from the outside world by a screen of bristling irony".
He is cognizant of the complications of being a white British guy singing dancehall, a situation he tiptoes nimbly around by obscuring himself, slipping in and out of a light patois, using Auto-Tune, and varying his phrasing until the meaning of the words begins to drift into oblivion.
Instead, he emerges from the conclave as an arch conservative (his choice of the name Pius XIII places him in a lineage of extreme orthodoxy), a Pope who not only refuses to be photographed but also obscures himself completely from his public.
Watson, as arrogant as he was obscure, found himself working with an equally self-possessed but somewhat overlooked older man at the Cavendish, Francis Crick, a 35-year-old would-be biophysicist who had seen service as a scientist in the second world war.
Chants of "down with the military regime," intermittently pierced the thick walls of the cage, with Morsi himself obscured from view in a separate chamber.
Bettison argues that he himself did nothing to obscure the truth or falsely blame Liverpool supporters for the disaster.
Bush himself suffered no consequences and, by that time, was claiming that the "Iraq surge had worked", a misleading drumbeat meant to obscure his calamitous original decision.
He wasn't always obscure.
