Two Fingers – Keman Rhythm Music Video

*** See the behind the scenes of this video shoot here****

We recently shot the music for the Two Fingers Song “Keman Rhythm”. The song is lryicless, so it really allowed us to interpret the song however we wished.

The song sounds combative and tense, so I knew what I was working with in terms of the tone of the video. But it took some time for me to come up with a story. I tested two different ideas, but ended up scraping them both. That’s when I stumbled upon a book.

I was given a series of essays by Normal Manea. When I opened the book “On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist” there were some scribbles on the first blank page. The book was given as a gift and the sender wrote out a Pier Paolo Pasolini poem as a note in the front. The part of the poem that’s quoted was.

Pasolini quote

Intelligence will never have much value
in the collective judgment of this public’s opinion.
Not even the blood of concentration camps
could draw from a million of our nation’s souls
a clear judgment of pure indignation.
Each idea is unreal, every passion unreal,
in a people who lost their unity centuries ago
and use their gentle wisdom
only to survive, and not to gain freedom.
To show my face – my leanness -
to raise a single, childlike voice,
makes sense no longer. Cowardice accustoms us
to seeing others die atrociously,
locked in the strangest indifference.
So I die, and this too causes me pain.

This theme of indifference stuck with me. I just watched the film  by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne called “L’enfant” (The Child) which also explores the issue of a lost and indifferent generation. So now I had my idea and tone, but how was I going to communicate it.

What I decided to do was to respond to the Pasolini poem above as it relates to the sounds of the song. So I wrote this:

What value do words have?
I’ve yelled “never again” too many times now.
Lacking an audience my words became  less  real, less focused.
I was only able to articulate  need,  not ideas.
In the absence of a  listener I retreated to study new words.
In the crowd I emerged more compassionate and angrier than ever before.
We were  the rebellious voices of dissent.
Our collective chant is the sound you hear now.
A bottomless war cry.
The  sound of pure & passionate  indignation.
But our chants were  as  different as we were. Our demands for “freedom”, “justice”, “power”,      “help” all layered  on top  of  one  another and  became  entangled and deformed.
What words lost  in their definition was rediscovered in their collective vibration.
A new word was born.
Angry, rhythmic  and distorted.
But they couldn’t  understand us.
I will not whisper.
Volume is the ammunition of communication.

… So I whispered “Fuck that. I refuse to be indifferent”.

I chose this idea because it allowed us to play with the deep vibrations of the song. As the deep bass of the song is introduced the text across the screen reads:

But our chants were  as  different as we were. Our demands for “freedom”, “justice”, “power”, “help” all layered  on top  of  one  another and  became  entangled and deformed.
What words lost in their definition was rediscovered in their collective vibration.

The idea, is to communicate that this sound is the sound of layered protest. But as the more layered the words of protest become, the less identifiable the demands are. All that is left is a sound. Interestingly enough, that sound still embodies the main tone of the ideas of the collective. The layered voices become indistingishible from one another but nevertheless still sound angry.

The baseline therefore becomes a word. It communicates all of the demands of the protesters at one time. The sound embodies all of their wishes.

But this new word isn’t understood by the powers that be. If everybody whispered the sound, or took turns speaking, it would be less distorted and possibly understandable, but as our narrator points out

Volume is the ammunition of communication.

Therefore, they refuse to whisper.

The song ends with the narrator “giving in” and whispering “Fuck that. I refuse to be indifferent”.

The music video is a modern day response to the Passolini poem found above.

As the video scrolls across from left to right we see angry, scared, tortured and helpless faces intermixed with photographs of representatives of the state. The video ends on the face of indifference.

Enjoy the video.