Today’s Music Video Monday takes a troubling, high-energy, color-saturated trip into the minds of Joecephus and The George Jonestown Massacre. “Voices” is a riff-heavy banger about, well … maybe about being your own best friend?
“No one ever calls one me,” Josephus sings. “That’s OK cuz I’ve got voices in my head.”
Well, maybe it’s a bit more sinister than that.
“Voices that talk to me all through the night/Voices that tell me everything’s alright/Voices that tell me things untrue/Voices that tell me everything about you.”
The band tapped Memphis director (and the Flyer’s own film and TV editor) Chris McCoy to capture the anxiety and paranoia of it all. And McCoy did it all, too — producing, directing, shooting, and editing, with some help from his wife and Memphis film editor Laura Jean Hocking for finishing touches.
The finished product is a dizzying, dazzling display of disquieting imagery. Silent-movie-era Satan, fairies, and a guy spitting up … coins?
“Since I was doing everything myself, I tried to keep it simple,” McCoy said. “I was going in an entirely different direction with it until I showed [singer Joey Killingsworth] the first cut.
“He introduced me to the films of Segundo de Chomón, a Spanish filmmaker from the very early silent era who was kind of a proto-Surrealist. So, I threw away what I had and started over, remixing Chomón’s images with the band’s performance.”
If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
