“27th and National” stands out in the Milwaukee Film Festival’s “Milwaukee Music Video Show” with a concept that plays like if Edgar Allen Poe joined a skate gang. (That’s a good thing.)
On a gray, drizzly morning, a man comes to. A mic cable is wrapped around his mouth. He looks like he’s just been left for dead, or at the very least hungover after a night of drinking. Oh, and he’s being pursued by a skull-faced goon in a red flowing cape.
Despite all this, things could be very worse in Kelly Anderson’s music video for “27th and National.” Very worse. That goes double for the Milwaukee Music Video Show, the first program in the Milwaukee Film Festival’s “Cream City Cinema” selections this year, and we’ll touch on the highlights in the long and winding program of locally-sourced music videos, documentaries, and narrative projects from now until the end of the festival.
And “27th and National” is among the best. Conjuring unparalleled atmosphere, equal parts chilling and dadaist, Anderson and featured artist WC Tank indulge in macabre whimsy with self-destructive enthusiasm as Tank’s throaty track reverberates throughout like a vibrating, irregular heartbeat.
Tank pops up again in “Cream City Cinema’s” music program, this time working behind the camera for Seregenti’s “Doctor My Own Patience.” The Chicago-based rapper draws back the blinds (literally) in a disco-fueled revisitation of a past life, mixed memories and all. It’s bittersweet, as strolling through the refuse of a dead relationship can only be so glum when you’re doing it on roller skates.
“Much” takes a similarly swirling approach as it follows Busdriver between backyards and sidewalks, all of which are lit at cinema’s golden hour. Jam-packed with lyrics about “doing too much,” the third single off the MC’s latest mixtape gets a nimble springboard. (The three snapping dancers who magically find their way behind Busdriver in every vignette also help.)
“Coplights” traffics in bittersweet imagery for its Group of the Altos cut. With supreme longing, the visual companion to the Milwaukee group’s single off 2015’s R U Person Or Not presents fragments of broken faith and distant, unearthed recollections. Clips from home movies and an ominous waterfall add warmth to the video’s arid wilderness before everything winds back into itself again.
WebsterX pops up twice as well, first in his own video for the extremely catchy “Lately.” The Milwaukee rapper begins by rising up out of the ground before parading through co-directors Cody LaPlant and Damien Klaven’s funereal period setting. Webster X shows up to turn Lex Allen’s “Cream and Sugar” sour, shifting the poppy bacchanal with undead beaches and a game of “hide the corpse.”
For Rio Turbo’s remix of “20/20,” Dan Boville creates an all-encompassing collage of old footage and visual textures that combine for a kind of end-of-life epiphany, and Kiran Vee mashes up contemporary samurai and Yakuza imagery in Lorde Fredd33’s “SOS,” a video that’s hard not to read as a poetic, disorienting meditation on police violence.
- “The Milwaukee Music Video Show” plays at 9:45p at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theatre on Fri, Sept 23. More information can be found at mkefilm.org