When I was in 7th grade, I would bull-whip the bus driver to get me home in time to watch Total Request Live every day after school. The same videos would dominate the Top 10 for weeks at time. I’d park myself in front of the convex TV screen and shout expletives at Carson Daly, hoping that Korn might finally oust Britney Spears for the number one spot. Music videos were our favorite show. We knew the words, we knew the costumes, the sets, we knew every dance move to “Oops I Did It Again.” And then, one day, they stopped showing the entirety of the videos, because N’Sync was stopping by the studio. The screen time for videos became shorter and shorter, until they just became wallpaper, playing in the background with no audio.
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The music video sort of died for the kids of my generation. Of course, we didn’t know that a lot of those videos really sucked. We were too young for the cinematic days of animated Beatles and Martin Scorsese turning Michael Jackson’s “Bad” into a social commentary on gang violence. TRL faded, and with it, our interest in the music video faded too.The music industry’s been through a lot in the past decade, what with pirating and iTunes giving rise to the age of the almighty single. But we’ve also had stuff like Beck releasing an album on sheet music alone, Radiohead releasing a newspaper, and the return of vinyl—and with it, a revitalized appreciation for a full-length album that you can listen to all the way through.And then comes Dirty Projectors, saying “Hey, let’s make a music video. No wait! Let’s make an album video.”
“It’s not quite a music video and it’s not quite a film,” said Dave Longstreth during the Q&A after last night’s premiere at Landmark Sunshine Cinema. “Just an awkward, uncomfortable middle ground.”That awkward, uncomfortable middle ground that the man behind Dirty Projectors is referring to is called “Hi Custodian.” It’s a colorful dreamscape starring the whole gang, set to a collage of music from their newest LP, Swing Lo Magellan. At times channeling Kubrick, Spike Jones, and Mark Rothko, it’s 20 minutes of beautiful weirdness.Longstreth talked about how they had made three music videos for songs off of Bitte Orca, two of which he was so unsatisfied with that they’ll never see the light of day.
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“So when we made this album, and we had those conversations…Amber [Coffman, vocals/guitar] suggested that I—because I’m such a pain in the ass—that I should try to direct them. So I wrote some treatments for some of these songs…and the narratives of these videos started to bleed into one another a little bit, and so I thought, what if we just made them all into a single thing?”That they did, and the result was a captivating (albeit, perplexingly) loose narrative that begins with Longstreth crooning “About to Die” on his deathbed, surrounded by the other Projectors in various quirky costumes as well as a gaggle of clergymen from various creeds. Amber and Haley’s harmonies reverberated through the theater as their images faded into one another on a backdrop of changing colors.
The visuals and the music work symbiotically. As someone who listened to the living shit out of that album after it dropped, watching the film all of a sudden gave the music a new context, while also making me think what the film would feel like if you threw, say, “Oops I Did It Again” in the background instead.Discussing the film outside the theater, my friend Landen observed, “He’s never made a movie before, so it's almost like you gave a kid paint and a paintbrush for the first time. There's talent somewhere down there, but it's gonna be weird because he's just sort of flinging paint for the first time.”
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It was sort of one of those feelings where you’re like, “I’m not sure what just happened, but I dig it.” During Q&A, I managed to get picked after waving my hand frantically like that kid in my 7th grade class who always knew the answer to every question the teacher asked (He didn’t care about TRL, psh) and asked Longstreth about a scene where he, leaning on crutches and covered in bandages, stumbles upon a bunch of hot chicks in bikinis washing a car in slow motion. I said that it almost seemed like he was walking into a pop video, something reminiscent of what I might have seen on TRL in 7th grade.
“I wanted the thing to have a dreamlike quality,” he said after thinking about it for a few seconds. “And so I worked super hard on every detail of the images and how I wanted to do them, but I didn’t really think about why, or what they meant. At all.” The crowd chuckled. “To an almost embarrassing extent.”So maybe he is that kid slinging paint for the first time. And maybe “Hi Custodian” will be the first of many new films that interpret not just a song, but a whole album. I’d try to get home from work early to watch a show that had a Top 10 of those.I followed up my question with one for Amber and Haley, and asked about whether or not they really are working on a Forbidden Harmony that can make a man’s head explode.“No, I haven’t heard about that.” Amber said, acting adorably coy. “The thing is that Dave writes the harmonies, so maybe he’s got something up his sleeve. But I’m hoping that nobody’s head explodes, because, y’know, I don’t wanna go to jail.”
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