On the heels of Presidents Day, we offer up the sublime, sociopolitical visual opus “Strangetown USA” from Oakland avant-garde rocker Pancho Morris.
The video treatment for the wily track is a thing to behold, offering up a series of epic, carefully orchestrated long shots that follow our hero Pancho through the ghoulish underbelly of America’s caste system. It’s as if the lovechild of Tom Waits and David Lynch was raised in La La Land and fed a steady diet of propaganda while taking musical theater lessons from Charles Manson. Take a look below to see what I mean.
All and all, it’s probably one of the most radical and entertaining music videos we’ve seen all year. Bucking the traditional film making structure, the team behind it worked on a consensus-driven basis with 100 artists in the Bay Area, collaborating for months to create vignettes, props, and the fantastical sets that filled an Oakland warehouse to create “Strangetown USA.”
The track is from last year’s excellent Great Again LP in stores now.
