With my recent posts looking back on The Clash I’m reminded of all the ways that punk rock influenced the scenes that followed it. Even if the aesthetics we associate with punk music come and go, many of the ethical ideas that punk celebrated and the DIY productivity it inspired have fueled “independent” movements in all of the arts ever since the 1970′s. In my own productivity I haven’t recorded music that I’d call “punk,” but the shoestring budgets, sweat equity trades, and music for music’s sake consciousness that’s shared by all of my collaborators comes right out of CBGB or Warhol’s Factory or a warehouse in London where a band called The Clash recorded an album called London Calling: we’re all clipped-together with those same spikes and safety pins.
One concept I’ve fueled with specifically punk, anti-capitalist ideas is my ongoing war with music videos as advertisements for artists and songs. Since the beginning of music videos it was clear that it was important to treat the medium more like a short film than like an infomercial. With that in mind I’ve been lucky to have most of my videos made by new media artists.
Antonia Oakes showed a collection of art videos that feature my songs as their soundtracks as part of her Future Shock installation at Nashville’s Modular Art Pods event in June. Here’s her breakdown on that otherworldly installation…
FUTURE SHOCK
Videos projected on a 2002 Dell desktop monitor/computer painted white inside a white cube art pod during Modular Art Pods at OZ Art Fest, Nashville, TN, June 21 – June 25, 2016.
videos by
ANTONIA OAKES
music by
JOE NOLAN
BLUE FEVER BLACK VISION
Blue Turns Black
Reenactment of a child’s fever hallucination.
DETROIT CITY BOY
Detroit City Boy (demo)
Diego Rivera paints the Detroit Industry fresco at DIA, re-imagined in red, white and blue.
PARADISE DEMO
Paradise (demo)
Rocket cam view of a space shuttle Atlantis launch.
THE WICKED SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO CHANNEL 6.6
The Wicked (demo)
Signal-jammed glitch from a Nashville public domain arthouse digital OTA channel.
DREAM IN THE DOORWAY
Dream in the Doorway
A fuzzy dream/memory of a house being built in Detroit c. 1940s.
Here’s the video collection…
Stay Awake!
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