In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at selected music videos by Cory McAbee.
Cory McAbee is a conundrum, both as an artist and as a subject for a Sound and Vision. Always on the periphery of mainstream indie cinema he is the true example of an outsider indie artist. His cinematic work is singular, truly oddball and extremely great. The conundrum is this: what kind of artist is McAbee? And could we call some of his art music videos, which is after all the main subject of this editorial?
Cory McAbee has a singular voice, and is a jack of all trades. He writes his movies, acts in them, directs them, and is the leader of the band performing the soundtrack. In most instances this band is The Billy Nayer Show, who worked with McAbee ever since his first short, surprisingly called Billy Nayer (see below). That short shows how much of an enigma McAbee is as an artist. The short film consists of a social faux pas in the form of a song, if you can call the non-sequitar rambling a song by traditional measures. The short is rotoscoped, elevating it from a cringe comedy sketch into something more interesting, less-throwaway, even if part of its selling point is that contrast between the highly stylized animation and the fly-on-the-wall embarrassment that makes up the project. Is it a short movie? It does not have much of a plot. Is it a music video? Yes, but not by any standard measures. Is it art? Definitely, but deliberately challenging, if not in a thought-provoking way. It is not ruffling any feathers, but it is exactly that throw-away slice-of-life matter-of-fact nature of the piece that shows what McAbee does well.
His works defy categorization. Is it film or a music video? Yes. See for instance his two shorts called Reno (both below), which split the difference. The song at the center is a looping sound-piece with equally repetitive lyrics. The first incarnation of the short uses this loop-de-loop as inspiration for a partly animated merry-go-round of several dancing cowboys (all a copy of the same performance by McAbee). The second short uses a similarly kaleidoscopic effect, with a silhouette of McABee and his cowboy hat as an overlay. It is one of the key images that returns of McAbee, the cowboy-silhouette, especially in his first two feature films The American Astronaut and Stingray Sam.
The American Astronaut followed several musical shorts like The Ketchup and Mustard Man and The Man on the Moon, which both have McAbee's semi-improvisational dry wit non-sequiturs as its centre. All three of those films are musicals. Stingray Sam is as well, but moves into a more hybrid direction with what it is supposed to be, again. Is it a feature film divided in several chapters, each of which has a song? Is it a tv-series made for mobile phones, with each episode centering a music video? It is both. This hybrid style gave McAbee the chance to release the film in chapters, and each of the songs as its own music video. The two best, according to me, are fan-favorite Fredward, a kooky song about male pregnancy (a theme in the entirety of Stingray Sam) and clone-genealogy. It's hilarious, weird, and very McAbee (and it's also below). The other one is Peg-Legged Father, a nice Mother-goose-like song for children, with some darker edges. Lowpoint is Party, a song that uses the same slur the Black Eyed Peas used to rhyme "getting the party started" with. Not great.
After Stingray Sam McAbee's music and band went through several different iterations and names. The Billy Nayer Show disbanded and was followed up by the likes of Captain Ahab's Motorcycle Club and Small Star Seminar. The latter was a send-up of Ted Talks and live self-improvement-type seminars. Taking the piss out of the coaching world, while also truly trying to improve and revolutionize the ways we talk about topics like science, environmental issues and sociological change. McAbee started focusing on live performances, and the collective. A lot of his music video type work in that time are throw-away sketches, like DAR or Collective Animal Names (see below) or the AI-experiment Hool-low-louwey. Many of these sketches can be found on Cory McAbee's youtube-page, where there is also a treasure trove of videos of live performances filmed by fans, the audience and festivals alike. The collective nature of live-performance gave McAbee a lot of material to work with, culminating in the film Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences (also below. Yes, the entire feature).
It is a brilliant musical-science-fiction-TED-talk-hybrid, that takes on every topic McAbee is currently fascinated by: time travel, space travel, AI, butterflies, Mars (his favorite planet, as it features in most of his films), self-improvement, ecological collapse, social interaction and especially the power of the collective. McAbee has pushed his cinema away from music videos and features, towards this more hybrid-on-the-fly collective performance art, where the sketches are an important part of the process, and the live-cinema-experience is more important than a "final product". Which is why he stays an enigma, not easily categorizable. And that's just the way I like it.