Decay Music Video – Expanded thoughts & lore
Last week I released the music video for my song Decay and I actually have a few more thoughts about it than I thought I would when I released it.
The theme of this song and really, the whole EP it’s off of, is the tragedy of living in an age where everything around you is falling apart. Those that have been following me know that last year I spent a lot of time putting together and releasing a benefit compilation to raise money for victims of ICE in my community. Through that fundraiser, I bought a ton of flowers from vendors. I hung up the flowers to dry over several weeks in my garage, knowing they were going to come in handy. Those flowers were one of the initial pieces I had when coming up with the concept.
I knew when I put out a music video for this album, I wanted to pick a decayed location like the abandoned missile site in Heat Death.
On my partner’s bday last year, we went on a hunt to find them new shoes. I remembered a mall from my childhood that used to have really interesting shoe stores: Puente HIlls Mall. It was so weird walking into the mall and seeing that the place was at least 75% abandoned and in massive structural disarray. I knew right then I wanted to preserve the location as a moment in time in my art.
We scouted the location in 1 day and filmed over 2. We got into a little bit of trouble almost as soon as we started filming. A janitor caught us while we were shooting the tea party scene location and called security on us. That scene was supposed to have way more flowers, with flower petals leading up to the tea party. However, we had to rush as fast as possible to avoid getting kicked out. Because this happened early in our shoot, the rest of the day we had to be cautious to avoid that janitor finding me jumping on and behind abandoned food counters.
We filmed our second date 2 months after the first. When we filmed at the mall in November, there were promises and signs that lead me to believe they were going to try to vamp up the place after the holidays. So imagine my surprise when we showed up to the food court booths destroyed and the area covered in caution tape! It was pretty cool honestly. It kinda worked out that we had such a giant gap in filming and got to show a timelapse of what transpired.
As we edited our video, Puente Hills Mall became the center of a major news story in East LA County. I mention it in the description of the video, but the City of Industry is looking to demolish the mall in June and turn it into a data center. It is something so tragic and somehow so fitting for the song itself (though I really wish that wasn’t the case). I don’t want the community a couple cities over to get poisoned by this shit so if you want to learn more about the situation: https://www.nodatacenterssgvcoalition.org/
I’m happy with how everything came together and how it ended up representing a moment in time, living in my community, fitting of the theme of the song and album.
The last fact I’ll point out that I didn’t learn til working on the video: Puente Hills Mall was the Twin Pines mall in Back to the Future!