My First Music Video ~ "Language Is A Prison House"

           I made all of the audio to the video below including voice-overs, music, and sound FX. The audio was set to Takeshi Kitano's trailer for his film Outrage, which was released by Warner Brothers. Kitano has not consented to having his name affiliated with our joint effort; thus making this video illegal graffiti. I titled our collaborative work “Language Is A Prison-House”; named after an intriguing quote by Friedrich Nietzsche.

The music video begs the question, “Are all artworks a collaborative endeavor?” Since it took countless people to produce what you see here, this piece questions the authority of traditional aesthetics (What is art? What qualifies someone to be the creator of an artwork? {After all, painters don’t create the paint or canvas they use} Is everything art? Are semantics capable of defining art? {Is there even such a thing as art?}).

What if you create something that hates you? The storyline is a meta-narrative where the artwork is waging war on the artist. The basic internal struggle that all of humanity shares is represented through the video in a comedic, larger than life sort of way via the battle between the characters and their creator. The characters are placed in a prison-house that I made for them because they can only speak using my voice.

The music video was created the opposite of most music videos. Instead of starting with a song to create a video, I started with a video and then set sound to it. The soundtrack is a collage of décollages from five of my songs. I never listened to the original audio or read the script for the video (it is a foreign film), which kept me from being influenced by the ideas of the original creators.

As I made this I felt like I was possessed. This happens to me often when I am making art and it feels as if I am merely pushing buttons and watching it unfold before me. It feels as if the Holy Spirit guides all of my decision-making during the process. I’ll share some examples because it is truly a freaky, weird phenomenon. 1~ I was lying in bed in a state of hypnagogia {threshold consciousness} the other night when I jolted out of bed in search of a pen and pad. I realized that the storyline could be a meta-narrative with the creator (me) as the antagonist, instead of a lame villain that I came up with on my own. 2~ A few songs fit so perfectly with specific parts of the video that I felt the only explanation was the Spirit guiding my creativity. For example, the gunshots already in my song fit perfectly with both scenes when the characters were shooting, as well as, a couple scene changes. Etc, etc.

          I have always been intrigued with the idea of collaborative art where the creators don’t know each other. I love that someone created the idea for this film, other people acted out and shot the video, Foley guys recorded the sounds for it, some corporation created the video cameras they used, and musicians made the soundtrack (this is even an oversimplification). Next, someone else comes by (in this case me), tears out the audio and original storyline, replacing it with their interpretation. It is the same concept as the “Hall of Bulls” cave paintings (in Lascaux) made 17,300 years ago that have continually been added onto since their genesis. So when someone reinterprets and/or augments another’s art, are they destroying the art or are they bringing the piece into a fuller, multifaceted dimension?