Eric Ducker | The Verge

The art of Pee-wee

2016-03-23T10:00:36-04:00

Inside the USC’s Ray Stark Family Theatre, the hair colors in the audience resembled a Manic Panic sampler pack. Atomic Turquoise towards the front, After Midnight across the aisle, Cleo Rose a few seats away from Bad Boy Blue with Violet Night streaks, a fried bleach job dotting every few rows. And don’t even get me started on the glasses frame action — let’s just say that Matt Groening was sitting in the front row, and he was severely outshined.Three generations of proud outcasts, weirdos, dweebs, punks, shy kids, cartoon fanatics, and serial fidgeters had gathered for “I Know You Are But What Am I?,” a filled-to-capacity event put on as part of the school’s Visions & Voices series. The featured artists were Wayne White, Gary Panter, and Ric Heitzman — €”the creative brain trust responsible for the look and feel of the transformative television show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, as well as the puppet characters that inhabited it. In his introduction, Professor Henry Jenkins announced that the word of the day was “avant-garde.” Throughout the nearly two-hour event, the crowd screamed every time it was uttered.

“It was an art project that happened to get on TV.”

White, Panter, and Heitzman explained how a group of underemployed illustrators and artists like them managed to get hired on a broadcast giant’s Saturday morning kids’ show, which starred one of the hottest comedians at the time. “I faked my way into the Playhouse by calling myself a puppet expert,” said White, his dubious credentials earned while working on a children’s program in his native Tennessee called Mrs. Cabobble’s Caboose. White was the one who convinced Broadcast Arts, the New York-based production company known for their animated spots on MTV, to hire Gary Panter, an underground comic book artist out in Los Angeles. Panter already had a history working on Pee-wee Herman projects and would soon become the show’s production designer and art director. Panter brought on Heitzman, a buddy of his from art school in North Texas who used to put on avant-garde [aaaaah!] puppet shows with him in basements. The three became known as “the stuck up boys,” smoking weed on the corner in front of the show’s SoHo sweatshop-turned-studio and pulling 20-hour workdays.

That night they rarely mentioned Herman, the character who shares a body with actor and actual human Paul Reubens. They acknowledged that Reubens created the show, that he fought for their creative freedom, and that in the end it was him who made the final call on every aspect of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. But they seemed to take more joy in recounting his unrealized ideas, which now sound more like conceptual art pieces. They said he dreamed of starting a bank just for kids, as well as a housing development called Pee-wee Acres. Supposedly he wanted to adopt a baby and raise him to eventually take over as the new Pee-wee Herman.

White and Heitzman gave PowerPoint presentations about what they had been doing before they became part of the Playhouse gang and where their subsequent careers had taken them. They showed slides of old concept art and made jokes about the Hollywood suits they had wasted hours of their lives with in meetings for projects that never came to be. When it was Panter’s turn, he delivered a monologue in front of a giant screen covered with the results from a Google image search of his name. He talked about his father, who had died a week and half earlier and who only painted pictures of cowboys and Indians. He remembered becoming obsessed with modern art as a ten-year-old and how he desperately wanted to be a hippie, drenching himself in benzene as he made elaborate batiks in his school’s art room. He rambled about how he worked at a funeral home as teenager, and if you got in a car wreck in the middle night, he’d be one of the guys to scrape you off the pavement. “I have no idea where I’m going with this, but it’s my story,” he said.

During the Q&A session, when an earnest student asked the three why they thought Pee-wee’s Playhouse became their big break, they said it was because they had been open to using their creativity in ways that they hadn’t expected, and were probably unprepared for. “We were doing our jobs for the first time. Who would have hired us in Hollywood? Nobody,” said White. “Paul was cool enough, he was an artist himself, and he hired all these unknowns. That was the power of the Playhouse — it was an art project that happened to get on TV.”

• • •

Last week, Netflix released Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, the first Pee-wee Herman movie in 28 years. It’s also the first Pee-wee Herman project in the 25 years since Paul Reubens decided to end Pee-wee’s Playhouse‘s five-season run and was later arrested for indecent exposure. It’s been six years since Reubens launched a stage revival of the Pee-wee Herman Show in Los Angeles and New York, marking his real return to Herman’s fantastical universe.

Reubens created the Pee-wee Herman character in the late in 1970s while a member of the Groundlings, the long-running Los Angeles comedy troupe that cultivated future stars like Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Phil Hartman, and Melissa McCarthy. A graduate from California Institute of the Arts’ theatre program, Reubens began incorporating members of the underground art scene to help him develop Pee-wee Herman’s aesthetic in its earliest stages. When he put together the first, more winkingly adult Pee-wee Herman live show in 1981, he and producer Dawna Kaufman brought in Gary Panter to be the production designer and to illustrate the show’s posters and programs. With Panter came his then-wife Nicole, the former manager of local wastoids the Germs. Nicole Panter would serve as the show’s creative consultant and eventually become a performer in it. Gary Panter was also Reubens’ co-writer on the original script for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. The two sold it to Paramount, where it would go unfilmed.

When a different version of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was made by Warner Bros. four years later, some of the key collaborators that Reubens chose were at the very nascent stages of their careers. It was the first feature of director Tim Burton, then a Disney animation exile whose short film Frankenweenie was considered too upsetting to be shown before a re-release of Pinocchio, as had been planned. Danny Elfman, the score’s composer and now a four-time Oscar nominee, was still the leader of Oingo Boingo, a rock band with obscure pretensions that had already made the cult classic film Forbidden Zone.

Pee-wee Herman’s journey from the fringe to fame was indicative of a broader transformation happening in the city’s cultural scene. “The ’70s in Los Angeles was a time where there wasn’t much of an economy in the art world,” says Gary Kornblau, founder of the now defunct Art Issues magazine. “It was completely underground — €”it was artists creating their own spaces and a lot of activities that weren’t commercialized at all.”

Then, as the decade flipped over, key changes in both the national and local economy happened. The United States emerged from a recession, and in 1983 the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in downtown Los Angeles. MOCA inspired a growing community of local collectors, and in turn, more galleries popped up. These galleries started scouting artists directly from the city’s art schools, inspiring graduates to stick around rather than leave for places like New York to make their careers.

“In the ’80s, artists, Pee-wee Herman among them, were no longer content to remain alternative,” Kornblau explains. “The goal was to bring that sensibility, whether it was through humor, or this engagement with childhood, to a more mainstream culture, while retaining its so-called alternative interests.”

The level of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure‘s success in 1985 came as a surprise. The studio had considered shelving it, but instead dumped the film towards the end of the summer. It eventually grossed nearly $41 million dollars domestically while only costing an estimated $6 million to make. When Pee-wee’s Playhouse debuted in the fall of 1986, it was the most anticipated event of Reubens’s career. “Every step up until CBS decides to put it on the air for children, it’s not been a children’s thing,” says Henry Jenkins, several weeks after the USC event. “It’s been more for adults and more from a fringe aesthetic. It’s a bit campy, it’s a bit culty, it’s definitely avant garde-y [aaaaah!] in the ways in which it’s positioned itself. The shift is from doing something that’s a parody of a children’s show to doing a children’s show.”

In 1985, making television wasn’t cool, and making children’s television was even less cool. Most shows in the genre were animated tie-ins meant to sell toys or cash-in on a film property. The climate was much different than it is today, where producing bizarre, self-aware, and adult-friendly shows like Adventure Time and Phineas & Ferb is often the goal. It even predated savvy shows like Ren & Stimpy, The Powerpuff Girls, and Sponge Bob Square Pants by at least five years.

But by hiring a staff largely from outside the industry for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Reubens managed to make something both strange and broadly appealing. “We weren’t from the closed-off professional world of set design and puppeteering. We were from this open world of art,” says Wayne White, over the phone. “We felt complete freedom to borrow from any source we could. I was thinking a lot about German Expressionism and Little Golden Books from the ’50s. We were all thinking about toys from the ’50s and ’60s, too. We were thinking about abstract painting. You name it, we would throw it in there.”

Though four of Pee-wee’s Playhouse‘s five seasons were made in Los Angeles, its first was done in New York. Its goals mirrored what fine artists like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Rodney Allen Greenblat were doing on those same downtown blocks. “They were all bringing pop art back in this new, exciting way,” says White. “That’s exactly what Pee-Wee‘s was also about. It was pop art using commercial art references, but spinning them into a new kind of expression.”

Pee-wee’s Playhouse incorporated outsider influences — kitsch aesthetics, drag culture, experimental animation — and managed to make them palatable to middle America. “When Paul made it innocent, he let everybody in on the joke,” says John Lindauer, the show’s animation director in its final two seasons. “Innocence is like the opposite of pretension, and that’s the genius of Paul Reubens, and the genius of Pee-Wee.”

(Glen Wilson / Netflix)

The new film, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, was produced by Judd Apatow and co-written by Reubens and Comedy Bang Bang‘s Paul Rust. It’s a charming journey and sometimes manages the same fantastical moments of former Pee-Wee Herman projects. Though this time out, its creative team is filled with industry veterans, people whose long list of credits include everything from The Royal Tenenbaums, to Flight of the Conchords, to Skating with the Stars. The most subversive selection might be its director, John Lee.

Lee’s best known for being a co-creator of Wonder Showzen, which debuted on MTV2 in 2005. Like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Wonder Showzen embraced the trappings of children’s shows from another era, but instead took them to a far more unsettling place, with kids dancing to songs about slavery and puppets berating people on the streets of New York. The rap group Das Racist took its name from one of its jokes.

Watch Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim (where many of Lee’s newer shows have run) on any night of the week, and you can sense the lingering, slightly deformed effects of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The sensibility may be darker and the jokes more divisive, but they share a manic wonder. “He had a show that was in a box, and he made it nuts,” says John Harvatine IV, the executive producer of the hyperactive stop motion animation show Robot Chicken.

The impact of Herman has also filtered back into the art world through a generation who watched him as kids and then kept him close with VHS and DVD collections. You could see it last year during Ben Jones’ show at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, where video projections of geometric shapes radiated from the walls and visitors played on glowing ping pong tables with bases built from cartoon dogs and dragons. “If you go to any art gallery in Los Angeles, you’re going to find whimsy that just feels like that person loved Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” says John Lindauer.

• • •

In February, I pulled up to the storefront on the far edges of Echo Park that Seth Bogart and Peggy Noland share. The two were unloading a pair of giant Styrofoam arms from the back of a Toyota Sienna minivan. Bogart had just bought them for $70 from a guy downtown who had put them up on Craig’s List. They didn’t know what they were going to do with them yet.

Inside the small space, which houses both Noland’s eponymous shop and Bogart’s Wacky Wacko store, they sat sucking on cheap candy amidst the wreckage of an interior overhaul they were doing themselves. The two decided to move to Los Angeles together in 2011, her from Kansas City, where she’d gained a national reputation for designing outré clothing, and him from the Bay Area, where he fronted the trashy garage band Hunx & his Punx and ran a hair salon. At first they lived in a gnarly house in Lincoln Heights, plagued by rats and cockroaches and leaks. “It was a bad time, it was a really bad time,” says Noland.

“Everyone assumes we’re all obsessed with Pee-Wee.”

In recent years, worn out from over a decade of touring, Bogart has gotten more into fashion and visual art. His sculptures feel obviously indebted to Pee-wee’s Playhouse, though turned more campily grotesque — his creations include a vomiting version of the beloved Chairy. Bogart says that as kid he was immediately drawn to Herman. “I traded all my Star Wars toys for Pee-wee Herman toys,” he says. “I wonder if I had a crush or him or something? The colors and the way that everything looked so cool or crazy just appealed to me as a young gay in Tucson.”

356 Mission

A few weeks later, when he held a release party for his self-titled album at the Echoplex, he did it under the name The Seth Bogart Show. An intro video that combined animation and lo res footage of Bogart cheekily laid out the rules for the night: take your clothes off and keep your shoes on, smoke weed, don’t touch him unless you’ve paid $100 beforehand, and Instagram your pictures as soon you take them. His performance was filled with multiple costume changes and pre-taped commercials for products like pantyhose for men and virtual reality tanning machines. At one point, the buff security guards that flanked Bogart on stage revealed themselves to be strippers. They were pulled off stage by a pair of female police officers in tawdry outfits, who, of course, turned out to be strippers as well. It felt debaucherous, but never dangerous — €”the type of ridiculous thrills you might try to pull off before your parents came home.

Back at the storefront, Bogart and Noland explained that Herman’s influence was so pervasive any place they went that it usually didn’t even have to be named. What was once avant-garde [ahhhh!] is now just a part of the shared cultural language of a generation of weirdos. “You attract like-minded people who share inspiration and share a certain level of taste,” says Noland. “Regardless of what city I’m in, everyone assumes we’re all obsessed with Pee-Wee. And they’d be right.”

Savages’ Jehnny Beth talks about Adore Life and her songwriting process

2016-01-29T15:41:04-05:00

Last week, Savages released Adore Life, an album of occasionally menacing, frequently desperate, and sometimes tender love songs. The London-based quartet’s 2013 debut Silence Yourself put them most obviously in the tradition of English post-punk from the late 1970s and early 1980s, but their intense recordings and ferocious live shows made them a modern favorite. Adore Life further widens the group’s spectrum by embracing elements of hard rock and brooding ballads, amid lyrics about how “love is a disease, the strongest addiction I know.”

After finishing their extended tour for Silence Yourself in 2014, band members Jehnny Beth, Gemma Thompson, Ayse Hassan, and Fay Milton only took a month off before beginning work on what would become Adore Life. After a period of writing new songs, in January of 2015 they made the rare move of testing out this raw material in front of live audiences, playing nine New York City shows at three different venues over 19 days. Then they went into the studio to further refine the music before releasing it a year later.

Savages’ sound and aesthetic can feel like a strategic assault

Savages’ sound and aesthetic can feel like a strategic assault, composed of guitar slashes, puncturing drums, theatrical vocals, feedback, all black outfits, and unforgiving light. They are a thoroughly considered band that dissect and distill everything they put out into the world. Here Jehnny Beth, the French-born lead singer and main lyricist of Savages, discusses the group’s creative process and what makes it out of her notebook.

Eric Ducker: You can tell that certain bands only record new material so they have an excuse to go on tour, while some artists are only interested in being in the studio to see how far they can push their music in that context. With Savages, how do you see the divide of emphasis between touring and recording?

Jehnny Beth: Live performance informs the recording. I have to say I enjoy every part of the process, but my favorite would be writing. I enjoy playing live, but recording for me is not my main favorite. Probably you’d have different answers from other members. For example, Gemma [Thompson], our guitarist — I’m talking for her here — I would imagine she would say she loves the process of recording because it allows her to take some time. She had time on this record to experiment, to try different gear and different amps, and to try different sounds that she has in mind. She has time to explore these things. There are a lot of possibilities that you have in the studio that you don’t necessarily have live.

When do you usually write lyrics?

Pretty much anytime. I don’t need a quiet time necessarily, I just need to be able to reach out to my notebook and my pen as quickly as possible. It can be any time of the day, any time of the night, whatever I’m doing, so I always have it in my bag.

How quickly do you share what you’re doing with your bandmates?

That depends. Unless we are starting the process of writing, I don’t really share my work. I never know when I’m writing if it’s for Savages or if it’s for something else or if it should just stay in my notebook. When we start making something that’s when I start trying out some things. I send the lyrics to the girls so they can have a look at what I’m talking about, because they’re all really interested in that process as well — the meaning of the songs and what we’re trying to say. It’s all entangled with the music, it needs to be closely connected, otherwise you can’t really have a record.

So they know what lyrics are about? I’ve interviewed bands where the drummer might say, “I have no idea what he’s singing about.”

They don’t know everything, but they know the concept and they are really interested in it, even the drummer. They are interested in knowing what the song is about and what feeling it evokes, the communication between the sounds and the voices. They really pay attention. I would be very desperate if I was playing with musicians who weren’t paying attention to the meaning of things. I think that’s what brings us together as well.

How easy is it for you to scrap your work, whether it’s lyrics or entire songs?

It’s very easy for me. I don’t have any problems with getting rid of something if it doesn’t work. Of course you get attached to things. Sometimes you’re trying so hard to find a way for these words to fit in, but they don’t fit in, so you have to give up. Maybe they will find their way into another song or in another time. That’s why I started doing spoken word on tour in between songs. Sometimes they emerge as a song. I remember doing, “I need something new in my ears, something you could say, perhaps,” [the opening lines from Adore Life‘s “I Need Something New”] which was part of a bigger text, but I only selected that section. I got down on the stage to be with the audience, and the girls were surprised. We really enjoy that kind of playful thing where everyone goes, “We’re going there? Ooookay, cool. Let’s try it.” Then everybody tries to follow and respond to that, and that created that song.

Were you ever more precious or protective of your stuff, or have you always had this openness to change?

No, you get it with time and experience. I get more and more prolific as I get older. At the beginning when you write, if you’re 15 or 16, you tend to cherish one thing you’ve written for weeks and you’re really proud of it, which isn’t the feeling I have now. It’s a matter of trusting yourself that you can do better all the time. Even if I really love the song “Adore,” and I really managed to say what I wanted to say on this song, I’m not worried that I can’t write another song that would maybe [be better than] this one.

This leads me to the shows you did in New York last January. Why then, and why there?

It was a pretty weird choice, right? In January, in New York, in the blizzard. It was pretty hard work, loading gear in the snow, quite mental. Well, we wanted to get out of London. We had been stuck in London for like six months, and the place where we had been writing got sold. Beyond that, we always had our heart in America from the first record, we always had good audiences there. It’s always interesting to take your music out of its habitat and see how it checks out and how it transforms it.

At each of those shows in New York you were trying out new things. As you get ready to tour this album, do you have a fixed game plan?

We always consider the venue, the place, the time, the town. We want to really adapt the set list to how we’re feeling and how we think the audience is going to be. We always want to try new things — a new start, a new end, a new movement. I’m sure we’ll transform things like we’ve always done. We’ll adapt our sets to the environment, or we’ll be bored halfway through and start writing a new song on stage or we’ll introduce a cover. There’s room for that.

How do you adapt a show to a particular night or crowd?

If you’re in the town and the room starts to pack up with very young, excited fans, then you want to make sure you bash out with the most exciting songs at the beginning to get everybody going and start a mosh pit by song three. You can feel it in the room, whether it’s going to be a slow start or if it’s going to be a really quick burner. It’s just matter of reaction to that.

Do you remember the first time you performed publicly?

I do and I don’t, because I was three years old. My father is a theater director, and we went on tour in Russia [in the mid-1980s] for one of his plays. It was a play about 1789, which is the French Revolution. I was playing the daughter of the king, and there was a scene where I was carried in the queen’s arms, crossing the stage.

What about your first time performing music?

I had two instructors, jazz musicians — a singer and a pianist who were a couple, older than my parents. They were people I used to go to every weekend to learn piano and sing. I was probably eight when I started being their student. At 10 I did my first piano recital. I was a terrified. Absolutely. Piano was all right, but it was singing that I was absolutely terrified of.

What were you afraid of?

I don’t know. I was actually too nervous to sing.

How did you eventually get comfortable performing?

When I moved to London with Johnny Hostile [who later produced both Savages albums]. In our band John & Jehn, I played a Farfisa organ. I had a massive, particular Farfisa with a big cabinet, which weighted about 72 kilos. I was playing the bass with my left hand and the organ with my right hand — a bit like a Doors thing — and I would be singing. This was very formative. We were playing everywhere in London, absolutely everywhere, every shithole. We learned so much from those experiences, and we toured in Europe for several years. So just experience, that’s how I got over it. I was really scared to sing and perform, but the more I did it, the more I got over it. I get nervous still, but I’m not nervous when the room is full. If I have an anxiety, I’m thinking, “Is no one going to come?”

I rewatched your performance at the David Bowie Is… exhibit opening in Paris from last year. Obviously it’s extra emotional now because of his recent passing, but what also struck me is the way you presented those songs live is different than the way you present songs by Savages.

It is different. I was part of a project. I wasn’t the center of it, I was just providing vocals. It wasn’t my thing — I was directed for it, there were loads of dancers — so it’s not me in Savages. I can be a singer as well for different projects if I feel like it. Savages is particular because it’s where I found my voice. Savages is where I found my Jehnny Beth character. It’s where I found how to express myself. And I enjoy it the most. But I like to sing for other people as well, and I like to consider myself a singer, not just a musician in a band.

Talking to Dave Meyers, the director behind Missy Elliott’s ‘WTF’ music video

2015-11-20T10:51:51-05:00

Last week Missy Elliot finally and fantastically returned with the video for “WTF (Where They From).” Anticipation has been high for new music from her since February, when Katy Perry ceded a sizable piece of her Super Bowl halftime performance to a mini Elliott set, but the “WTF” video also caps a comeback year for its director, Dave Meyers.

Elliott and Meyers have teamed for 11 videos, starting with 2001’s “Get Ur Freak On,” and they’ve produced such highlights as “Gossip Folks,” “Work It,” and “Pass That Dutch.” The two started collaborating just as Meyers’ career was starting to catch fire. He started gaining attention in the late 1990s with clips like Kid Rock’s “Bawitaba” and Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up,” then rode that wave until the mid-aughts, when he was handling videos for the likes of Céline Dion and Janet Jackson. He then started focusing on commercials and directed the remake of The Hitcher, sporadically making music videos (often for his other most frequent partner, P!nk) before stopping altogether in 2012.

This year he’s created five music videos for artists ranging from legends like Janet Jackson, mid-career stars like Ciara and Janelle Monae, and newcomer Pia Mia. Having just returned from South Africa where he was filming a commercial, here Meyers explains the roots of his relationship with Elliott, what was different about making “WTF,” and finding creative freedom in slashed budgets.

Eric Ducker: When you’re in South Africa and you have a video that takes off like this one did, do you realize how big it’s getting?

Dave Meyers: It was a trip. I had just left dinner and was headed to watch The Martian and my phone just exploded. Then I realized that they just dropped it, and it was like rocket fuel. By the time the movie was done, there were interviews to be done and people that wanted to talk and jobs that wanted to be booked.

When you got the call from Missy Elliott to do the video, did you know new music from her was in the works?

There was a lot of good energy bubbling in the Missy camp (and obviously in the public world, too) from the Super Bowl. I don’t know her exact version of the story, but my guess is that the adoration for her Super Bowl performance led to an enthusiasm on Missy’s part to dust off the old, talented side of her artistry. Then Pharrell and Atlantic Records and everybody was just hyped on riding that good juju. Maybe a month later that I got a phone call with the track. We wanted to shoot in July, but the puppets were the first idea, and when we contacted the puppet maker he was like, “Oh yeah, it will be three months to make those.” We had to greenlight just the puppets without really knowing how or in which way the overall video was going to be. So we rushed to get those made, and while those were being made, we had a three-month creative journey of filling out the rest of the video, which is the longest I’ve ever had to think out a video. It was a very enjoyable and exciting process for me and Missy, because usually it’s so fast moving. This time we really got to do a lot of chatting and a lot of collaborating and a lot of careful planning and conversations — all the stuff that normally would be greatly consolidated.

“Missy approached me as a peer and as a filmmaker.”

I read that the video was originally going to be all puppets. How did the concept change during that three-month period?

The initial burst was the excitement for the puppets, then it kind of dawned on me and Missy, like, “Is that enough?” Obviously there’s a big dance appreciation for what Missy is as a brand, and the puppets will dance, but will they dance in an innovative way enough to capture what Missy means to the dance community? She’s been gone so long, so for her to re-emerge with just puppets and to not see Missy … There’s so much charisma associated with her and the way she frontlines a dance experience, it seemed like it wasn’t quite a Missy experience. We had been talking, and after the VMAs happened, we really went hard on it. I was like, “We have to do what we do.” Over a couple days I pitched her all the surreal things I could dream of, then we shot it two weeks later.

Can you take back me back to when you guys first worked together on “Get Ur Freak On”? That was the first video you guys did together, but she already had had a successful collaborative relationship with Hype Williams, who did her first videos like “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)“ and “Sock it 2 Me.”

She’s very nurturing of creative talent, and she’s very demanding of visionary-ness. My introduction to her was one of a kind. Most artists I just meet them on set, or there’s a complimentary phone call of some sorts, but with Missy I got wind about three or four months before I met her that she was “watching me,” which was kind of exciting to hear. Then I got phone call that she wanted to meet and have dinner. I was like, “That’s so elegant and civilized.” And it was exciting, because as a director, it doesn’t seem like the artists are necessarily your friends. You’re sort of just there to provide images and thank you very much. And Missy approached me as a peer and as a filmmaker. We sat and we had dinner and we talked about life and things we like in the world. I didn’t even know what the record was, it was really just, “I’m an artist who likes you,” and of course I liked her. Then she invited me to see Crouching Tiger [, Hidden Dragon], and I was like, “Oh my god, I’m at the movies with Missy watching Crouching Tiger.”

Do you know if there a particular video you had done that made her start watching you?

I don’t know. I always wondered that myself, and I don’t think I ever actually asked the question. Sometimes you get superstitious. And in another way, I don’t want to know. I want to take her energy and my energy in that moment with whatever song she’s approaching me with and see where my mind goes.

At the end of the 1990s and the start of the century you were going really hard with music videos, then you tapered off, and then you stopped completely after 2012. Now this year, you’ve done five. Why the change?

I suppose tapered off is the right term, but I intentionally left. I had hit the ceiling on videos very hard. I had won countless awards and done creatively everything I could think of. And two new doors opened up: a movie door and a commercial door. I did the iPod silhouette campaign and I won every award with that. Then I got like 10 years of commercials lined up, and I’m still going, I’m still full-time in commercials. Simultaneously I did a movie and then I signed onto another huge movie, but it fell apart. The movie acclimation, it’s there, I know a lot of people in movies, I’ve done tons of meetings, but it’s a little bit different of an animal that hasn’t quite aligned. There are two movies now that are in active development that might happen next year. But both those doors are where my journey went.

Then last year I sort of missed music videos, to be honest with you. The budgets have been reduced so much over the last 10 years, due to all the stuff that everyone already knows, so I was gun shy for a while about what I could actually create at a half or a third or even a fourth of the budgets that I used to get as a standard. Last year I started to say that I don’t care about budget, it’s about being clever, it’s about being connected with the music. Just give me a camera and remove everything that costs money around me, and let me just go out there and see what my vision looks like naked. That’s what I started on this year and then I quickly evolved and I started figuring out creating images that I like at a much lower [budget] level. And then that matured.

Leading up to Missy, I did a few with that premise and really enjoyed them. Once you accept “I’m not making any money today, let me just have some fun,” I started having better results. Back in the day I actually ate off what I made [with music videos], and now I eat off of other avenues and revenue streams. To approach videos from a pure creative standpoint might even make my work better. I’m really excited about my opportunities, and I think Missy is an indication, internally; it’s one of my favorite Missy videos, and it was made with less money.

Was there anything specific about Janelle Monae’s “Yoga” that got you back into videos?

That came through the backdoor from a record label commissioner who I first met on Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” I had started to communicate to the people that I had become friends with over the years that I would love to do a video. A lot of them were like, “Well, we don’t have anything with your kind of money or budgets.” I had been hearing that kind of thing for years, so I just reached out to the ones that would trust me, and that was the first one. It just sort of made sense.

I wondered if Janelle wanted to do something different. In my mind, Janelle was wearing suits and that kind of branding. She was approaching me like she wanted to wear jeans and tank top and get a little more grounded. I wanted to get that attitude out of her, because I’d never seen her like that. It was a different type of creative exercise than what I chase down with Missy. That led to Ciara, who I’ve known since Missy’s “Lose Control,” we’ve almost collaborated three or four times, then she was like, “I really want you to do this record.” So we did [“Dance Like We’re Making Love“] and it was beautiful. I thought I was really able to stretch what you understood her to be as an artist, and in a weird way, it stretched even how people see me. They see me more a little bit how Missy is, so to do something sexy and beautiful and sultry with a beautiful woman that can really dance, it was a multi-step process.

This year you also did a video for Pia Mia and you’ve got a clip with South Korean artist CL in the works. Is your approach to doing a video for an emerging artist different than one for an established one?

With a new artist, whether they are brand new to the world or brand new to me, I really try to meet them, talk to them, or somehow understand where they’re trying to go. It’s a little hard, so sometimes [you have to] close your eyes and listen to the song to guess what their vibe is and hope they live up to that when you meet them.

Talking to Penelope Spheeris about time, rock ‘n’ roll, and The Decline of Western Civilization

2015-06-26T14:33:05-04:00

When director Penelope Spheeris finished interviewing Chris Holmes during the tail end of the 1980s for her documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, she figured the footage was worthless. Plenty of the musicians she’d talked to around Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip metal scene were drunk while she filmed them, but Holmes was beyond obliterated. As Spheeris barked questions at him in the California night, the lead guitarist for W.A.S.P. spent the session floating on a chair in his swimming pool while still decked out in black leather. He poured a bottle of Smirnoff vodka on to his face and into his mouth, and punctuated his ramblings with farts noises, all while his mother sat behind him, almost wordlessly, her face shifting between concern and resignation. “I thought we’d have to figure out if we could get him back again,” Spheeris says. “I thought it was just trash.”

Spheeris salvaged what she could from the shoot and placed it toward the back of the documentary, after all the party boys and girls have had their chance to posture for the camera. The segment is hilarious and ridiculous, but underneath Holmes’ antics is a world of pathos. “I work a job, and I’m a piece of crap,” he says with a mirthless cackle. It has since become the most famous part of the cult classic film.

During the first two decades of Spheeris’ expansive film career she would periodically check in with a loud-mouthed, comical, chaotic, and often out of control youth-fueled music scene of Southern California for her The Decline of Western Civilization documentary series. She always found something human and honest in her subjects, even as she got older and they stayed the same age. Spheeris says she tried to be non-judgmental in how she portrayed these communities. She knew that some would see the people she trained her camera on as buffoons or threats to society, while others would see peers and role models. And now-classic moments like Holmes’ drunken interview would not have worked without that unfazed gaze. “That particular scene shaped my whole career, to be quite honest with you,” says Michael Starr, the lead singer of comedy metal band Steel Panther. “At that point, heavy metal was at its peak. It was awesome to be drunk, floating in a pool. You knew you had a disease and you were going to kill yourself eventually, but that was cool back then. People just looked at that and said, ‘Wow, this guy knows how to party. Everybody knows how to party.'”

“It’s been a year of pure hell.”

On June 30th, Shout! Factory will release the entire The Decline of Western Civilization trilogy as a box set, marking the first time any of them have officially been on DVD or Blu-ray. The first installment of the series, which had previously only been available on VHS and LaserDisc, was released in 1981 and is all about LA’s punk scene, with performance footage and interviews from crucial bands like X, Black Flag, and the Germs. The final installment, which never even got a proper theatrical release, much less a home entertainment one, was made in 1996 and ’97 and focuses on the city’s often tragically substance-abusing gutter punks, as well as hardcore bands like Final Conflict and Naked Aggression.

For decades, Spheeris has resisted giving the Decline films the archival treatment they deserve, mainly because she didn’t want to revisit her past work. Then three and a half years ago, Spheeris decided she wanted her daughter Anna Fox to take over the family business of making movies and managing their rental properties around the city. Fox agreed, on one condition: that her mom finally release a collection of the Decline trilogy.

What followed was a labor-intensive period of work on all three movies at once. “It’s been a year of pure hell,” Spheeris says.

Spheeris and Bret Michaels during the filming of The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years

Spheeris grew up in trailer parks around the beach cities of Orange County in the 1950s and ’60s. Her father owned a traveling carnival in the American South, and she describes her mother as “a trailblazing hoarder.” When she was same age as the young teens that populate the Decline movies, she too was speeding around Southern California unsupervised, seeing concerts by surf rock kings like Dick Dale and the Deltones. “We’d go the [Rendezvous] Ballroom on Balboa Island, we’d go to El Monte Legion Stadium, we’d go to Cinnamon Cinder [in Studio City],” she says. “When I was 13 or 14 years old, I’d go in a car with a bunch of lowrider friends and head out to all the shows.”

After getting her masters in film at UCLA, Spheeris began working as a producer for Albert Brooks, handling his pre-taped segments during the early years of Saturday Night Live and his first feature, Real Life. At the same time, Spheeris started her production company Rock ‘N’ Reel, which made music videos for acts like the Staples Singers, Seals & Croft, and Funkadelic — years before MTV existed or most people even knew what a music video was. Though she earned a living from the work she got from major record labels, she wasn’t into most of the music they were putting out. But after hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time, she went to a show at the Masque, the Hollywood club that welcomed many of LA’s early punk bands, and became fascinated with the local scene.

Shot between 1979 and 1980, the first Decline of Western Civilization captures Los Angeles punk at a critical period, as the more art-influenced original bands from the city proper were being drowned out by the hyper aggressive hardcore bands from Orange County and the fans who followed them. Punk was also becoming increasingly stigmatized around the city, as cops would raid shows and certain acts got banned from most venues. It got to the point that Spheeris had to rent a soundstage to shoot the performances by the Germs and Black Flag for the film because there wasn’t anywhere else they could play.

“You look at documentaries that have come out about other scenes and other moments in history, and Decline of Civilization holds up so well. You can still show that movie to someone and say, ‘Here, this is LA punk,'” says Damian Abraham, the lead-singer of the Toronto band Fucked Up and the host of the Turned Out a Punk podcast. “A few months later a lot of those bands would break up. A few years later, a few of the key players would be dead. It’s a perfect snapshot of this incredibly important moment in music history where people are only now realizing how important it was.”

In the years since the first Decline‘s release, some from within the punk scene have criticized Spheeris for not featuring now marginalized bands like the Screamers or the Weirdos in favor of Black Flag or Circle Jerks. While Spheeris admits she was particularly drawn to the hardcore acts because they came from the same part of Southern California that she did, these were also groups that would go on to have a monumental impact on punk and DIY culture over the next 20 or so years, whether people like it or not.

And considering the underground subject matter, it’s impressive Spheeris got much well-shot and intimate footage just as the era was cresting — oftentimes taking her camera right into the mosh pit. This was long before it was commonplace for up-and-coming musicians to post video to their various social media accounts, or to have camera crews from publications or brands come to their practice spaces to document their early phases. “[Spheeris] was in there filming Black Flag living in the Church,” says Katy Goodman of La Sera and formerly of the Vivian Girls (who also admits to having a giant Germs circle logo tattoo on her butt). “It isn’t just memories or reenactments or going back to old places. She’s right there filming it as it happens, and that’s what makes it so amazing.”

Despite positive reviews, the first film didn’t get much distribution during its actual theatrical release. (The hectic scene at its 1981 LA premiere also resulted in Police Chief Daryl Gates sending Spheeris a letter telling her to never show the movie in the city again.) Instead, the first Decline amassed fans through tape trading, bootlegs, and revival house screenings. Meanwhile Spheeris’ interest in punk found its way into her narrative work — it’s at the center of Suburbia, her first released scripted feature, as well as 1987’s Dudes, a punk road movie starring Jon Cryer and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

In the mid-’80s, as her daughter was entering her teens, Spheeris used to take Anna to shows with her to make sure she’d be able handle herself at concerts once she got older. By the time Fox was 17, she was dating Nikki Sixx, the bassist of Mötley Crüe, one of the superstar bands of L.A.’s hair-sprayed and debaucherous metal scene. A new era of rock and roll had descended on the city, and as Spheeris began noticing the crowds of people jamming the sidewalks and spilling out onto Sunset Boulevard night after night, she got the idea to make a second Decline movie about this world.

When Spheeris turned her attention toward about metal, a genre that birthed platinum-selling bands, many of her friends from the punk years considered her a sell-out. But watching the two films back to back, you can’t help notice some similarities between the two worlds. Sure, punk was nihilistic, but there was a still a shtick to it, even if it didn’t involve smoke machines and tying scarves to your mic stand. In the first Decline, when Derf Scratch of Fear baits the hostile crowd with wisecracks about the similarities between girls and six packs of beer or how many punks it takes to change a light bulb, you can hear someone in the audience call out the punchlines before he can get to them. They’ve heard these jokes before.

But while the bands and crowd members Spheeris talked to for the first Decline were relentlessly negative, convinced that society was fucked beyond repair, there’s a single-track optimism that defines most of the interviews in The Metal Years. The insistence of these aspiring rock stars that they are destined to be rich and famous is so unflagging that it can come off as desperate. And watching it now is an almost bigger bummer, considering that very few of them actually made it to where they dreamed they’d be.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part III

In the early 1990s, Spheeris landed the directing job for the first Wayne’s World film. It became a box office success millions and millions of dollars beyond what anyone expected. Though the movie is set in suburban Illinois, you can see that same naïve self-assuredness from the second Decline film in Wayne and Garth’s “she will be mine, oh yes, she will be mine” convictions. But after the financial wellspring of Wayne’s World, Spheeris passed on the sequel, and spent most of the rest of the decade making middling comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Little Rascals, and Black Sheep.

One day in 1996 while driving, Spheeris noticed some punks hanging out on Melrose Avenue. She approached them, excited that the world she first encountered in ’70s might still around in some form. (This is a very Spheeris move, it turns out: she first asked Fear if they wanted to be in Part I after driving past them on Laurel Canyon as they put up posters for an upcoming gig.) She imagined it would be fun to do a follow-up on the first Decline featuring kids who weren’t even born when it came out, but she soon learned how many of them had run away from or been kicked out of abusive households, and had now turned into full-blown teenage alcoholics. Throughout the Decline series she had documented kids who were hopeless in many ways, but by the end of 1990s, she realized how bad things had gotten. “The title was [originally] meant to be ironic, but by the time I got to Part III, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Spheeris says.

“When I did Decline III, it was totally life changing for me,” she continues. “I had no idea that shit was going on out there. At that point in my career I was really rich from being paid millions of dollars for doing studio movies, and I did not have a sense at all what real life was like. That’s when I went out and got my foster parent license. I had five foster kids to try to help a little bit — we all should, because it’s a fucking mess out there.”

Using her paycheck from Senseless, a comedy starring Marlon Wayans and David Spade that she contentiously made for the Weinstein brothers (and which tanked miserably), she financed the third Decline on her own. “I showed it to my agent at the time. I asked if we could get distribution for it and he just threw his hands up and walked away,” she says.

The distribution offers she did manage to get would have required her to give up the rights to the first two installments, so she passed, and the film was scarcely shown. Regardless, Spheeris remains connected to the film, which makes it all the more fortunate that more people will now finally be able to see it. “Decline III is my favorite movie I ever did, and the people in Decline III are my favorite people I have ever worked on a movie with,” she says.

And perhaps for that reason she left the series at that. Nowadays Spheeris is dismissive of the idea of continuing with future installments of Decline. “I’ve been there and I’ve done that and I don’t give a shit anymore,” she says with a laugh. She says she’s not interested in any new music, but it’s a great game to imagine how she would have approached the Southern California scenes of this new century. Her take on Odd Future and other circa-2010 Fairfax Avenue rap acts fueled by streetwear and Tumblr could have been amazing. Anna Fox says Spheeris’s 15-year-old grand-daughter now goes to shows by herself and is into the goofball garage rock world of Fullerton’s Burger Records, a community through which Spheeris could have gotten back to her Orange County roots. Who knows — maybe at this moment some yet-to-be-discovered young filmmaker is picking up where she left off.

“In my opinion, nothing lasts. There’s a beginning and a middle and an end to everything.”

Of the stylistic conventions that link the three Decline movies — from the light bulb-lit interviews, to the montage of the bands reading the filming release, to somebody always making eggs for breakfast — perhaps the most telling is the quick text at the start of each movie that states the exact span of months during which it was filmed. Asked why she decided to note such a specific demarcation, Spheeris says, “In my opinion, nothing lasts. There’s a beginning and a middle and an end to everything. And I mean everything. I mean my fingernails and I mean the universe. To have that little mark in time is important.”

The loneliest roast: Justin Bieber does public penance on Comedy Central

2015-03-30T10:45:01-04:00

Pulling past the guard booth of Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, I had the strange, recurring sensation that I first had nine days earlier: I felt sorry for Justin Bieber. The reason I was here on a sunny Saturday afternoon in March was the taping of the Comedy Central roast of the 21-year-old singer and multi-multi-millionaire, but I didn’t feel sorry for him because I was going to spend the next several hours watching him being brutally teased, mocked, and insulted. I felt sorry for him because I wasn’t sure he had any friends.

For years, the targets of the Comedy Central’s roasts have tended to be celebrities past their prime (Roseanne Barr, Pamela Anderson, William Shatner) or show biz adjacent oddities (Flavor Flav, Donald Trump). But last year, the network somehow convinced James Franco to be the center of this bizarre ritual’s cruel attention. Most of the roasters — like Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, and Aziz Ansari — have connections to Franco or are considered his peers, and the roast master was Seth Rogen, his pal and frequent costar. By contrast, the list of participants for Bieber’s immolation, which had been announced a little over a week earlier, just seemed off.

Chris D’Elia is Bieber’s favorite comedian, so I guess his involvement made sense (though Chris D’Elia being your favorite comedian, not so much), and Ludacris contributed the guest verse to Bieber’s sticky sweet breakout hit “Baby,” which means that the two of them will both have to reckon with its legacy in the afterlife, but beyond that pair, there was no discernable reason guiding the lineup. Standup Jeff Ross was there, because as many of the other participants noted that night, Comedy Central roasts are all that the 12-time veteran is known for these days. The hired assassins for the evening were two comedians who largely made their name working alternative rooms: Natasha Leggero, who has cultivated a persona of an effortlessly cruel party girl, and Hannibal Buress, whose comedic style is more likely to be compared to cerebral spaceman Mitch Hedberg than Don Rickles. (Not coincidentally, both Leggero and Buress have new series coming soon to Comedy Central.)

The others filling out the dais may have been chosen by Comedy Central talent bookers playing a game of free association: Justin Bieber likes basketball, so get Shaquille O’Neal; Shaquille O’Neal is a tall black man, so get Snoop Dogg; Snoop Dogg has been arrested, so get Martha Stewart. As for roast master Kevin Hart, it’s not unfair to assume he probably just picked the hosting gig that aired closest to the release date of Get Hard.

It’s no surprise that contemporaries like Drake or Miley Cyrus or Lil Wayne, who all could probably deliver the digs and take the hits required of them, didn’t get involved. The reality is that despite the millions of devoted fans that Bieber still has, he’s become something of a toxic asset. In the three years since Bieber turned 18, he has yet to release an album, but here are some of his greatest hits: adopting a monkey named Mally and then leaving him at a German zoo; pissing in a bucket and yelling, “Fuck Bill Clinton” at a picture of Bill Clinton; egging the home of his Calabasas neighbor and causing tens of thousands of dollars in damages; smoking so much weed with his formerly estranged dad on a private plane that the pilots had to put on oxygen masks; being punched by Orlando Bloom at a club in Ibiza; getting arrested for a DUI after racing his yellow Lamborghini in Miami.

Now that Bieber has confessed, the roast would be his public penance

After this rough stretch (for him, for humanity), he began 2015 on an apology tour, first releasing a video in January on his Facebook page after an awkward appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to say he wasn’t proud of how he acted in the recent past, telling his laptop’s camera, “I’m not who I was pretending to be” and “I want to make the best impression on people and be kind and loving and soft.” The next week he went back on The Ellen Degeneres Show to further explain the feelings he expressed in the video. Now that he’s confessed, the Comedy Central roast would be his public penance, a place to take his lashes and then hopefully move on.

The roast was filmed at a soundstage on the Sony lot, and the press watched from a makeshift tent inside another soundstage, where two flat screens showed a live feed of the proceedings. Before the taping began, my neighbor for the night wondered, “Do you think he’s going to cry? He seems like a little bitch boy.”

Hart introduced the roast as “possibly the beginning and the end of Justin Bieber,” and after the star eventually arrived on stage in a royal blue suit and with an imitation of a mustache, Hart asked him, “Why would you do this? This is like suicide.” Later, D’Elia, the seemingly closest person to Bieber involved, told him what many people watching must have been thinking, “No one likes you bro, we’re just here to help our careers.”

Any possibility that Hart would turn down the famous raunchiness of celebrity roasts in deference to Bieber’s young fan base ended quickly when he made the first joke I’m aware of about titty-fucking Martha Stewart. In fact, it only took Hart three jokes until he got to one about Bieber and sucking dick. According to my unofficial scorecard, over the course of the night there were 15 jokes about Bieber being gay, transgender, or a hermaphrodite. In comparison, there were 13 about him wanting to be black, five about his abandoned monkey, three about his relationship with Selena Gomez, and three involving his fans or his longtime manager Scooter Braun being pedophiles. There were no jokes about his recent Calvin Klein ad that was supposedly Photoshopped to make it look like there was a bigger bulge in his underwear, but apparently with these things, the roastee is allowed to make some topics off limits, and maybe that was one of them.

The most popular subject of the night actually was how short Kevin Hart is, with at least 25 jokes referencing it. There were also six jokes about how big O’Neal’s penis is. Pete Davidson started off his set by managing to combine these two tropes, telling the crowd, “It’s an honor to be at a roast hosted by Shaq’s dick.” 21-year-old Saturday Night Live freshman Pete Davidson’s lead-off set was a bit of a revelation. Though he’s showed promise on SNL, on this night he was vicious and willing to make use of his own darkest moments. Davidson, who is the son of a New York firefighter who died on September 11th, addressed Hart and Snoop Dogg, telling them, “Soul Plane was the worst experience of my life involving a plane.”

Unexpectedly, some of the most inventive jokes were about how bad Snoop looks these days:

“Snoop, you look like Shaq’s skeleton” (Leggero)
“Snoop, you look like Shaq going through chemo.” (D’Elia)
“Snoop, you look like a retired WNBA player.” (Ross)
“Snoop is like a cool ass salamander. He’s like a rejected Mortal Kombat boss.” (Buress)

For his part, Snoop spent much of the night openly getting high on stage next to Martha Stewart.

As the evening went on, talk in the press tent turned to what lines probably wouldn’t make it to broadcast. Leggero’s line about how Bieber learned to dance by dodging the coat hanger while in his 17-year-old mother’s womb was a contender, as was Ross’s crack, “If Anne Frank heard your music she’d have Übered to Auschwitz.” The Monday after the taping, Comedy Central announced that it wouldn’t be airing the few Paul Walker jokes that were made, none of which were as good as Ross’ response when his one about the late actor bombed: “Too soon? Too fast? Too furious?”

Midway through the night, Will Ferrell (again, not coincidentally Hart’s costar in Get Hard) made an unannounced appearance in character as Ron Burgundy, working the angle that Bieber’s bad behavior should be commended, not condemned. “This kid has spunk, moxy, and few other STDS,” he said. But the biggest surprise of the evening might have been Dave Chappelle’s presence in the audience, considering that the network that put the whole shebang together is the one whose $50 million he famously walked away from. I’ll try not to read too much into that fact and just assume that like the rest of us, Chappelle wanted to hear jokes about Bieber being a little shit.

For the most of taping, Bieber seemed to be enduring and often enjoying the abuse he was taking. As the custom goes, he took the last turn at the podium to get his revenge, asking, “What do you get when you make $200 million? A bunch of has-beens calling you a lesbian for two hours.” Of course, by the time he got to take his shots at the roasters, concepts like Jeff Ross not being famous or Ludacris not using birth control were already well-tread.

At the end of his time, Bieber abruptly switched tone and solemnly asked for forgiveness. It was so boring, such a departure from the tone of event, and so nakedly self-serving that I didn’t bother transcribing it. Maybe listening to hours of jokes about Brazilian prostitutes and Martha Stewart’s racism will turn your heart cold.

Afterwards there was a short press conference with some of the night’s participants. The comedians praised Bieber for being willing to do what he went through. “Here’s a guy I would never know, never really understand, never really respect, but now I’ve grown to like him, because he’s fucking cool,” said Jeff Ross. Still he could barely remember the words to any of Bieber’s songs.

When Bieber took the microphone, at first he remained in his sincere mode, saying, “This was a moment for me to show people where I am at in my life right now. Right now I’m in a moment of change. As I said, I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, but we’re turning a new leaf here.” Later when he was asked how Comedy Central approached him to do the roast, he nailed a legitimate impromptu zinger, “I actually approached them years ago, but they said I didn’t have enough material.”

As they were leaving the tent, I heard Ross asking Bieber if he was really about to get on his jet and head to Vegas as he’d told the press. Bieber said he was, and asked if he wanted to come along. Ross said he’d love to, but there was something else he had to do.

Kahlil Joseph’s m.A.A.d. gives new visual life to Kendrick Lamar’s breakout album

2015-03-27T11:43:25-04:00

Last Thursday, two new exhibitions opened at the main building of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, both part of what the museum is calling a “new era” in the wake of the tumultuous Jeffrey Deitch years. Most of MOCA’s downtown space is now dedicated to Sturtevant: Double Trouble, a retrospective of the replicationist Elaine Sturtevant, which features a muscle-bound dude in silver booty shorts dancing on a lit-up go-go platform for 45 minutes each day. And behind a wall and on the other side of a long black curtain is Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience. From the title, casual visitors may assume it’s a companion installation, but what is playing on a continuous loop in the darkened room is director Kahlil Joseph’s m.A.A.d.

Joseph’s body of video work falls somewhere between music videos and short films. Though they are definitely works of art, they’re usually watched on a laptop on Vimeo, not on museum walls. The approximately 15-minute-long m.A.A.d. is set to songs from Kendrick Lamar’s revered 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city. At MOCA it is presented as a double screen video installation with the side-by-side images either supporting or ricocheting off of each other. If asked what Joseph’s m.A.A.d. is about, the answer is “Compton, two decades after the riots,” but without real dialogue or anything resembling a linear narrative, a more accurate answer is probably “a feeling of Compton, two decades after the riots.”

Like most of Joseph’s work, m.A.A.d. is gorgeous but unsettling, meant to reflect the underlying instability that threatens erupt any day or moment in the infamous city. His camera gracefully travels through a public pool where teenagers sun themselves on hot concrete, to a house party where a baby sleeps on a red sheet under a yellow blanket. Joseph wanders across a hair salon’s worn linoleum floor and lingers on a close-up of a young man’s heavily tattooed face. There are eruptions of gunfire and flashes of a horse racing through the nighttime streets. In old camcorder footage time-stamped March 23rd, 1992 — about a month before the Rodney King verdict — Lamar’s father is shown in the street with his friends, goofily posing with his pistol grip pump shotgun. Then there are the moments of magical realism, like when the bodies of young men hang like bats from street lamps and storefronts. At one point a car pulls up for a drive-by casket viewing.

In her introductory remarks about m.A.A.d. at the media preview last week, chief curator Helen Molesworth said, “I encourage you to let that piece wash over you.” I watched it three times in a row, and when it was done I felt like I needed to swim to the surface to come up for air.

Joseph’s first music video was for Shabazz Palaces’ “Bellhaven Meridian” in 2010. It’s a three-and-a-half-minute-long tracking shot that literally turns the world upside-down and nods to Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep — the most famous, but still barely known, film from L.A. Rebellion, a group of experimentally inclined black directors that came out of UCLA’s film program in the 1970s. Joseph and Shabazz Palaces’ follow-up collaboration for the group’s 2011 recording Black Up began the build toward Joseph’s best-regarded work. In it, the images bounce between the rural and the urban — a lush rain forest or a dead rat on the sidewalk — as selections from the album blast in and out.

“Joseph has strummed a chord of emotion in some of us that is beyond the words that we normally use to describe film.”

From there, Joseph’s projects have included a short film for the Kenzo fashion house and a brutal take on FKA Twigs’ “Video Girl,” but the piece he’s best known for, and which got him attention outside the music world, is his 2012 collaboration with Flying Lotus for the Los Angeles producer’s album Until the Quiet Comes. It’s an upsetting, but cathartic meditation on the deaths of two young black males. Discussing it on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s website, visual artist and scholar Duane Deterville wrote, “The consensus of opinion amongst my peer group is that Joseph’s short film is pure genius. But beyond that, it seems, to have touched and strummed a chord of emotion in some of us that is beyond the words that we normally use to describe film.”

Until the Quiet Comes was submitted to the short film competition of the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, where it won the Special Jury Prize. In August of 2014, a single screen version of Joseph’s m.A.A.d. debuted at Sundance’s Next Fest in Los Angeles. “Every time I see one of his things, I can tell its his, even though it’s completely unique,” says Charlie Reff, a features programmer at the festival. “It has such a grip on its vision, so clearly and so strongly, that you know.”

Joseph does very few interviews, and the only biographical information that is usually provided about him is that he was born in 1981 and he presently lives in Los Angeles. Ask around, and you’ll get told that he’s a private person. In an article in the Los Angeles Times this week, some more details about him were fleshed out: he grew up in Seattle; his mother is a teacher; his father is a lawyer; his brother is the fine artist Noah Davis, with whom he runs the West Adams / Crenshaw gallery the Underground Museum; he interned for Doug Aitken; he worked at famed commercial and music video production company The Directors Bureau; and he was an editor for Terrence Malick in Texas.

On the Tuesday following the opening of Kahlil Joseph: Double Consciousness at MOCA, Joseph appeared at the Otis College of Art and Design as part of the school’s visiting artist lecture series. In a room filled with a few dozen students, Joseph spoke about how his career developed through being denied what he wanted to do. He wanted to go to film school, but didn’t get in anywhere, so he studied art at Loyola Marymount University and learned about concepts like the importance of specificity. He wanted to make music videos while working at the Director’s Bureau, but was told he never would, so he developed his approach on his own. When good kid, m.A.A.d city first came out, he wanted to work with Kendrick Lamar, but the three treatments he wrote for three different singles were all rejected. (Given the nature of Joseph’s work, it’s not surprising that the label would decide it was simpler to just have Kendrick pray his dick gets as big as the Eiffel Tower in front of the actual Eiffel Tower.) It wasn’t until the end of 2013, when Lamar needed video projections for his opening set on Kanye West’s Yeezus tour, that the rapper and his management approached Joseph. When the shows were done, Joseph edited the hours of footage he shot and compiled for that project into m.A.A.d.

Through Joseph’s lens, the album isn’t about the kid, so much as it is about the city that turned him into the person he is

Joseph’s m.A.A.d. was finished nearly two years after good kid, m.A.A.d city was released. Taken in now, even as we’re all still busy parsing Lamar’s follow-up To Pimp a Butterfly, the film suggests a re-framing of Kendrick’s breakout. The narrative surrounding the album was the story of one young man’s redemption, and the arrival of a masterful new voice; that Lamar signaled a rebirth of Los Angeles hip-hop. Through Joseph’s lens, though, the album isn’t the story of the kid, so much as it is about the side characters and background players in the city that turned him into the person he is.

At Otis, responding to a question about whether he had more freedom working in music videos or the fine art world, Joseph diverged into talking about how his best-known, award-winning video has over 2 million views on YouTube, but that number is nothing compared to the 60 million views you might find on a cat video. Still, he said that someone brings up a video he did with less than a million views to him every day. “There’s this weird inverse relationship between what people are really watching and what they will just look at.”