In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we discuss several music videos by Hiro Murai.
There was a time where it looked like Hiro Murai was losing some of his edge, becoming a more generic music video director, with music videos like B.O.B-'s Airplanes, Lupe Fiasco's DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love and Enrique Iglesias' Heartbeat, all of which sanded of Murai's more interesting edges, while keeping some of his main themes intact: all are glitzy explorations in which the lead singer manipulates the shadows and lights in his environment, shaping the world to their hand, becoming one with light and shadow, quite explicitly even in Heartbeat. This has been a theme since Murai's first music video for The Willowz' What's Wrong Is Right, co-directed with Steve Drypolcher, in which the lead character literally manipulates all lighting sources in the city, making it his own playground.
The idea of the individual in their environment, shaping it, evolving it, interacting with it, is a main theme in many Murai music videos. The environments that change are often liminal spaces, like diners, malls, roads and parking lots. Or like in the amazing music video for FKA Twig's Sad Day several of those. It is one of the more important music videos of his that I won't discuss at length, nor Queens of the Stone Age's Smooth Sailing, which is equally amazing. Nor will I discuss the theme of repetition in time and space, and doppelgangers that show up in many of his music videos, nor will I go deeply into the imagery of giants that shows up in several instances. That is because I want to focus on a theme that bubbled to the surface while watching some of Murai's recent output as a television director and executive producer. That is, the flip side of the coin of the theme I just stated about the individual shaping their environment: the individual ignoring their circumstances.
It clicked for me while watching Widow's Bay, the series that is oft described as "Parks and Recreation in a Stephen King-like small town". The lead character in that series is the mayor of the town, who willfully ignores the supernatural shenanigans, to keep pretending that all is well, in a extreme version of ignorance is bliss. This is also a theme in another Murai-led tv series, Station Eleven, the ill-timed post-apocalyptic pandemic series, that started shooting in early 2020, and had to be postponed due to a real life pandemic happening. The pilot and third episode are shot by Murai, and both feature a lot of people keeping up appearances, while the world is dying all around them. Art in the face of disaster is a main theme in a lot of Murai's work, in what I will somewhat jokingly describe as "This Is Fine"-cinema. Like the dog in the meme making that statement, a lot of Murai's work features characters who are in too deep, and their way of coping with disaster or horror is pretending none of it is happening. See also Atlanta-series highlight Teddy Perkins, or the entirety of the Murai-produced The Bear.
The first music video where I feel Murai really came into his own, after the aforementioned commercial sidestep, was The Shin's It's Only Life (see below), in which a young child is living his best life in a dark post-apocalyptic landscape, wilfully ignoring the monsters that have killed and taken captive all the adults. One of these adults, in his last moments, is The Shins-singer James Mercer, who in a brief respite of his ordeal has the monsters turn their attention to a fireworks display set off by the kid. The ending is open, but it does not bode well for Mercer, something which the child does not seem to realize.
Child's play gets more literally violent in Spoon's Do You (also below) in which a car driver is ignoring burning wrecks around him, before a final reveal that the city is being attacked by Kaiju-sized toddlers. The theme of car crashes also show up in Chet Faker's Gold (also below), in which gogo girl roller derby dancers act like sirens from myth and lure a man to his death by dancing in his car headlights. Death and dancing as intertwined gets even more literal in Flying Lotus' Never Catch Me (also below), in which two dead kids step out of their coffins and dance through the church pews, before driving off in a hearse. It is a beautifully haunting music video in which death is celebrated as the ultimate form of freedom.
That theme also gets quite literal in the only feature that Murai made this far, the Childish Gambino musical-fiction hybrid Guava Island. In that film the death of one of the leads becomes a big time celebration of life and freedom, in the face of violence and totalitarianism. The motto of the film is "Dreams are all we have" and that could definitely be the motto of Station Eleven too, another of Murai's works which is about art having the power to overcome the worst.
The island theme also shows up in Childish Gambino's music video Telegraph Ave(also below). Some of the best works Murai made are for Childish Gambino/ Donald Glover, be it the eternity of Atlanta, the short album-companion Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, or the big one, which we are gonna talk about later. At first, Telegraph Ave seems like a very light and frothy video, not really worthy of Murai's talents, with Gambino canoodling with his love-interest in a tropical paradise. There seems to be danger lurking on the horizon, in the guise of a violent third party, who seemingly has the same interest in the women as Donald Glover has. Wrong. The final part of the music video is batshit insane, in which Donald Glover's character gets brutally attacked by attackers in a car out of the blue. It is a far cry from the sunny palm beaches of the first part of the video, which then turns even stranger when it turns out Glover's character didn't die in the attack, for reasons best left unspoiled. The final look on the woman's face again is one of either blissful ignorance or total disconnect.
The most literal nod to the This Is Fine meme also shows up in two music videos, one for Childish Gambino's 3005 (also below) and one for Earl Sweatshirt's Grief. The latter show the rapper in a modified heat-pattern camera, that has been turned into a grayscale. One of the images is literally that of the rapper in a burning room. Childish Gambino's 3005 has a similar set-up. It shows the singer/rapper on a merry-go-round, which we finally are shown is in the middle of a burning landscape, while the stuffed animal Gambino has with him is increasingly decaying. An apt metaphor for living in a dying world.
Dancing with death is also seen in the last two music videos I want to highlight. Massive Attack's Take It There(also below) shows a drunk man wrestling with his demons, quite literally, as they show up as shadowy female figures who turn his drunken stupor into a lilting dance choreography. It is quite dark and vivid, making something poetic and beautiful out of something harrowing. The same can be said for Childish Gambino's This is America, the aforementioned Big One, the music video that got Hiro Murai a Grammy, next to his Emmy. Yes, Murai is already half an EGOT.
This Is America has been much-written about, discussed and dissected, but the main theme here seems to be the rampant violence against black people, and the very American ignorance surrounding gun violence. The whole music video plays with the disconnect between joyful dancing, singing and bliss, making way for brutal gun violence and apocalyptic upheaval. It is great satire of American mores, but instead of being seen as a wake-up-call, conservative voices were extremely angry. "How dare they". Even worse was the fanbase, who instead of taking the message about not ignoring the rot in American society anymore to heart, instead made reaction videos for youtube, and memes out of the video. It is extra painful when you realize that this memeification of violence, and the memefication of black pain is partly what the whole music video was about.
Why did a lot of Americans not recognize the true message of This is America? Were they too close to the mirror to see themselves reflected? The same thing happened when Murai directed an episode of Atlanta about my home country, The Netherlands. In the episode Sinterklaas is Coming to Town, the episode brutally satirizes some of the painful parts of Dutch society. It makes light of our country's liberal view of euthanasia, in a severely shocking moment. And it pokes its finger into the wound that is our country's use of blackface, with the severely racist character Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) during the Sinterklaas celebration. Dutch people did not understand the satire, and were up in arms about the episode. "Not everybody does blackface all the time!" It's severely missing the point, and the fact that some Dutch people thought that the episode was painful, just shows it is good satire. Good satire smarts.
It seems the case with both This is America, Sinterklaas is Coming to Town, and most of Murai's music videos is that he loves characters who are so close to the fire they fail to see that their world is burning. The same goes for a part of the audience, who feel the fire and feel the pain, but fail to notice that Murai is pointing out that they are the ones on fire. Don't shoot the messenger.