Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
As I was putting this week’s newsletter together, I was sad to read news of the death, at 79, of the rugged American actor Fred Ward. I enjoyed watching Ward bring his grizzled gravitas to films including The Player, Short Cuts and Tremors, but I think my favorite film in which he starred is Walter Hill’s lean, drum-tight action drama Southern Comfort, from 1981.
Here, Ward is the sneering, bumptious Corporal Lonnie Reece, one of a shambolic group of Louisiana Army National Guardsmen who find themselves woefully out of their depth in Cajun country. Southern Comfort works equally well as a Vietnam War allegory or as a gripping study of the perils of macho arrogance—and it’s one of the most purely tense films I’ve ever seen. It also works best if you know next-to-nothing about it going in. So stop reading this and cue it up. (Or prepare first with a blast of Ry Cooder’s rootsy, slow-burn score.)
I’ll be honest. I don’t miss the bygone days when, working as a freelance arts and culture journalist, I’d be called upon to give some instant reaction to a hot topic du jour. I mean nothing against some of the fine editors who commissioned me and helped finesse my prose, nor am I denigrating the work: as a freelance journalist, work is work is work, and you take it. What’s more, I have a ton of respect for writers who can thrive in this environment and produce lightning insight against the clock.
But I had this thought last week when the video for Kendrick Lamar’s new song “The Heart Part 5” dropped suddenly, and I felt a pang of relief that I didn’t have to cobble together ideas about this dense, tricky text on an hour-long deadline. That’s exactly what I did on Wednesday March 11, 2015, when the cover art for Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was released, and I hammered out a rapid analysis piece for The Guardian. Looking back on it, it’s not a bad effort, but I remember my stress in turning around the copy feeling completely antithetical to the conditions whereby one is best able to absorb and process challenging art. (I mean, yes, it’s journalism. World’s smallest violin playing here. But you can hopefully see where I’m coming from.)
As for “The Heart Part 5”’s video, which I’ve still only watched once, I didn’t have much of an initial reaction beyond being impressed by Lamar’s flow and intensity, and feeling that its use of digital deepfake technology was more than a little ghoulish and gimmicky. I’m sure its riches will reveal themselves to me upon repeat viewings, and when I’m able to appreciate the lyrics in tandem with the images.
Really, The Heart Part 5 made me think of one of my all-time favorite videos, “Cry” (1985), by pop duo Godley & Creme. One-time members of 10cc, a British band named after the average amount of a semen a man is purported to produce in any given ejaculation, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme peeled off as a double act, and developed a parallel career as directors of some of the most visionary music videos of their day. Their most vivid and innovative work includes Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film”, Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
For me, their masterpiece is “Cry”, which they directed for themselves. The song itself is a plangent wail of naked romantic misery suspended over a slow-burn, throbbing rhythm and weeping synths, and topped with a twangy, escalating guitar riff plucked straight from the land of rockabilly heartbreak.
In the video, which is shot in stark black and white, Godley, Creme, and a series of actors of all ages and races—framed in extreme close-up—mouth the words to the song. The twist is that these actors’ faces morph seamlessly, and unsettlingly, into each other, creating myriad crazy funhouse mirror images, over and over again. An editing technique called analog cross-fading was used to create this (then) cutting-edge effect. Here, for example, is white, beardy, bouffant-sporting Kevin Godley transforming into a small Black girl:
I could be wrong, but I think I first saw “Cry” on Doctor Fox’s Video Jukebox, a short-lived 1995 London Weekend Television show hosted by Doctor Fox—neither a doctor nor a fox, but a British media personality. I would have been around ten years old, and the video haunted me to my core. Back then, I was probably thinking less of its intentional so-maudlin-its-funny humor (there’s some exceptionally hammy acting, and a clown even pops up near the end) or its overriding theme—heartbreak is universal; it comes to us all—and more about how fucking terrifying and uncanny some of the compositions were. Even watching “Cry” today, I still feel an enormous sense of tension as the morphing composites form. The video is nearly 40 years old, but it still feels live, fungible, and weirdly dangerous.
“Cry”, of course, influenced a much more famous music video: Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” (1991)—or at least a portion of it. This elephantine spectacle, directed by John Landis, lasts eleven minutes, and features Macaulay Culkin, explosions, and Jackson jiving around the globe. The bit I’m talking about comes around five minutes in, and directly imitates “Cry”’s cross-fade morphing. But instead of the former’s coterie of crestfallen oddballs, Landis collates some of the world’s most beautiful people. And unlike “Cry”’s creepy, achingly slow transitions, these blends happen in a flash, making it (almost) impossible to take an amusing screengrab.
This sequence in the “Black or White” video is probably one of the purest encapsulations of Jackson’s post-racial ethos, and it feels as asinine and cringeworthy to me today as it felt uplifting and energizing to me as the six-year-old Jackson fanatic whose Mum bought the “Dangerous” CD for him from Our Price on Streatham High Road. Whereas Godley & Creme used editing technology to embrace and reflect the ambiguous murk of thwarted love, Jackson and Landis imposed an artificial sheen on the complexity of identity; a sheen that feels poignant if not outright tragic in the wake of Jackson’s ultimate appearance and fate. Really, it did matter if he was black or white.
In “The Heart Part 5”, Kendrick Lamar uses deepfake technology to suddenly and shockingly embody a host of Black American superstars—O.J. Simpson, Jussie Smollett, Kanye West, Will Smith—who reached the pinnacle of fame and flamed out in controversy, their racial identities pathologized for sport in the eyes of a hungry media. As I write now, and the more I think about it, the more I’m surprised Lamar didn’t use deepfake to morph into Michael Jackson. Maybe his story was too hot, too sad, too complicated to touch. It makes me want to cry.
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Just wanted to quickly chime in, as I just remembered it was possible to do so on the actual substack website (I almost always read in my email rather than on the site), and say I read your newsletter every Saturday morning at work, and it's an integral part of my day every week, and I absolutely love it every time, and you consistently inspire me with the breadth and depth of your writing despite how quick and clean you keep it every week. So, you know, thanks! Have loved your work for a long time (discovered you on the FC podcast some years back) so love to get to keep up with some of your stuff on a regular basis.