Bill Callahan: "America!"

Music videos are so often such missed opportunities. Especially considering it’s a medium without much currency anymore, it’s astonishing how many bands play it safe, simply recreating a live performance or trading in the same old, tired clichés. Free as it is from narrative constraints, the music video genre would seem to provide almost limitless opportunities for a creatively hungry filmmaker. Animation in particular lends itself well to music: from Fantasia to “Paranoid Android,” we’ve all witnessed the breathtaking harmony the two can achieve when done properly. In fact, I still remember the first time I saw that “Paranoid Android” video, up at four in the morning to catch a bus for an 8th grade trip to Washington, D.C. I held in my breath as I watched, bewildered and lonely, feeling like I’d been slipped some mind-altering drug. Animation can have that power.

Similarly, I’ll probably always remember when I saw the video for Bill Callahan’s “America!”, as it was, appropriately, on the 4th of July, in between prepping all-American cookout food. The video was animated by members of the Austin-based art collective Okay Mountain, whose website indicates this is their first music video. And it’s a jaw-dropping, unequivocal success. It helps that “America!” is the kind of rambling, stream-of-consciousness song that just begs for its own video: Callahan maintains a hypnotic hold over the listener with an irresistible groove, spurts of erratic guitar, and his trademark, rich, deadpan vocals. The video drives that groove even deeper, using the song’s entrancing qualities to full effect.

“America!”’s protagonists, if you will, are a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat (with no one attached) that stomp and float through the great American landscape. Intercutting these fluid adventures are any number of free-associative images: postcards flipping quickly over one another, scenes of a shuttle launch, birds swarming the Statue of Liberty, a preacher wagging a finger at his congregation. One of the most consistent themes here is the decay that threatens to undermine America’s beauty. A pleasant desert image pans to a cross section of the soil beneath, littered with bongs, beer cans, and bones, and in a surreal under-sea scene, fast food hangs suspended in the water like prey caught in a web. And as Callahan repeats “Ain’t enough to eat,” our cowboy-hat protagonist drifts over a desert dotted with beer can pyramids.

Like Callahan’s song, the genius of this video is its ability to skew American ideology just so; while appealing in some ways as a celebration, it’s also at times creepy and grotesque. Like pretty much all Americans on the fourth of July, its richly hued parade of a nation’s over-the-top iconography indulges in the signifier while shrugging off the signified. This is most blatant in the song’s brief breakdown, when an animated Callahan stands before an American flag wearing aviator shades. “I never served my country,” he admits, and exploding fireworks reflect in his lenses nonetheless.

Though there’s no shortage of subject matter to parse in this video, perhaps the most important thing about it is the way it embodies, wholly, those qualities that a music video should posses. It casts a spell over the viewer, who’s hypnotized by the satisfying click of image and sound, as together they weave a world both familiar and dreamlike, much more complex than the sum of its parts.