Let's not shit ourselves: The new Jay Z video is an event, regardless of what you feel about the new album, his responsibilies as an artist, or the fact that as an astoundingly rich, well connected, smart, and powerful man he operates in rarefied circles.
It premieres on HBO @ 11p tonight, immediately after his appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. And it's not being called a video: It's a Performance Art Film.
Director Mark Romanek — who occupies a similar position in the music video world as Jay does in the hip-hop world — talked about the video and its inspirations with Huffington Post.
The admitted main influence is performance artist Marina Abromovich and her "one on one" staredown show at MOMA — documented in the HBO film Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present. Romanek says, "What I pitched to Jay was: 'You regularly perform to 60 or 80,000 people at a time. What if you performed for one person at a time? What if it was like Marina's piece?"
And that reminds me of one of the advantages music video, or any music performance captured on video, over the live experience: The ability to focus. To get close. To provide angles and access that's not possible in even the smallest club, and certainly not in stadiums.
The interview is full of great insights, so I recommend you check it in full, but here are some of my fave quotes from the director:
On the inspiration and making something that's not a music video:
He name-checks a lot of artists, so it immediately put me to mind of the whole fine-art world, and since he's a performer I started thinking about a performance-art piece involving Jay's music. And every time we tried to think of something that was radically different from Marina [Abramovic]'s piece, it never seemed as good. So we said, what if we do something very much like that? But it was important to me that we weren't just ripping her off, that we had her blessing, so we reached out to her and she loved the idea and said she'd be happy to bless the event with her presence. The phrase "music video" got tossed around a little bit at the beginning, and both of us were like, "We don't want to do a music video. That's from another era. We need to do something that's more genuine, more spontaneous and more alive."
And on the fact that Jay Z rapped live for the entire shoot without any lip-sync... [Singing live in videos is something rare; Bruce Springsteen pioneered this with director Meiert Avis.]
It was never meant to be lip synced. At no point during the day did he lip sync. He did live vocals for six hours. The finished piece was always intended to be live vocals. I mean, that was the whole point of it. Otherwise, it would turn into a music video. He had a lavalier microphone on his chest that captured a beautiful vocal. It's completely obvious when you see the piece that it's not lip synced. Because every inflection and emotion that he performed on that day is different than anything like what's on the album. He's laughing. And one woman in her 60s showed up who was so elegant that he literally became speechless. He said, "You're making me lose my flow, but I'm gonna get it back in a minute." So we kept that in the video. He stopped singing at times and just talked to people, he kissed people. What you'll see is that it's like a tsunami of joyfulness. It's sort of the opposite of the tough-guy street-rapper cliché. Everyone is having such a good time and none of it is feigned. There's not a single fake moment in it. It's just a document of people having a really good time, Jay included.
Read more at Huffpo. And, tune into HBO tonight, Friday, 11p for Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film. We'll embed it once it's available
