In the wake of a resurgence of scene fashion, music and design, the Rawring ’20s is as great a time as any to look back on one of the defining years of scene music. No matter how many arguments happened over AIM between emos and scenesters, it was here to stay. The longer it stuck around, the more scene bands and albums began to emerge. It was virtually impossible to go a day without hearing Simple Plan’s latest single or turning on MTV without seeing a Sum 41 music video.īut what exactly is “scene”? The moniker appears as a more stylistic choice meaning emo style mixed with punk and a hint of vibrant colors. Lying dormant, a new alternative music sound and scene was awaiting its time to shine. The first one being “Fashion Killer” with Rihanna and Rocky.When the new millennium broke, the alternative music community was heavily saturated with popular genres such as punk, pop punk and emo. It was the second music video I ever shot.
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He came through and put on some clothes and said, “Let's shoot.” Since I already had the infrastructure to do this photo shoot and I already have a camera team on deck, we came up with some directorial concepts. I was like, “Come through,” and he was like, “I want you to shoot these three songs for these videos today.” My style is to never say no. He uploaded three songs on his Soundcloud and was like, “What city are you in?” I was in Paris, I was styling my collection for women, for OFF WHITE the Nothing New collection. The day that song came out, he was literally on tour with The Weeknd in Paris. It's magnetic I would say, because it's not one where it takes a whole lot of text messages to wake up or a whole bunch of planning. It's sort of the situation of the album cover - we have an organic way of working together. A lot will come through in the video.Ĭould you tell me any more details about the “XO Tour Llif3” video? I've been working on OFF-WHITE pretty productively, and I've decided to get back in that position of supporting an artist's ideas. Many people sort of want to be a creative director, but it's an awesome position to be able to support any artist's vision to get that out. It's supporting an artist so they get the most out of the project. I pride myself in collaborating and being a creative director, and creative direction isn't putting my opinion first. He comes to creative from a whole different place. You can only visualize it in the very last second and usually the label is like, “It's due.” You can look at Lil Uzi and know he has a strong opinion about his aesthetic. Imagine the hours of anticipation for this album. Was there any hesitation from him about putting the OFF-WHITE tape so front-and-center on the cover? His cover sort of embodies our short careers, and it's two people coming together from a long time ago. I think that in a digital age, album covers are becoming a lost art. It was his idea to wrap his album package in a physical way. I haven't done an album cover in what feels like six years. The same way the Nike shoes - you look at them and you can almost feel like you can do it yourself or you can see the handmade feel in it. You feel like you can peel it off, and that was important to me. That cover is pretty much a readymade example. That way a whole generation of kids will see themselves in the work, and do the work themselves too. One of the pillars of my design aesthetic is showing the process. I'm at a point in my career where I'm interested in seeing the consistency across different projects. The cover reminds me of your work with brands - making OFF-WHITE exist right next to the thing we know already. Uzi hit me up and was like, I need you to creative direct my project in the final hours. Obviously I've done a bunch in the past and I've recently been focusing on developing things outside of music, but I've always been feeling about getting back into it. Now I've made a conscious effort to get back into doing music projects. Whether we were in conversation or not, we just kept reconnecting and it's literally like effortless. He's been cool since that moment and he's had an appreciation for how we met.
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Rapping in his style comes naturally to him, and he's just been a genuine dude. He’s devoid of too many references, he's in his own world. There's always a new genre, and we've seen obviously rap evolve to what it is now, and we've seen different influences have their evolution on artists. How did you get to working on his album cover? He respected what we had done and we went out with them all night and his crew of kids, and I've known him ever since. At the time we were playing trap music, we were DJing and I was like, I don't even want to go on after this kid. You know how you go to cities and you hear a local rapper? Definitively this is the first time I found some kid and thought he's going to be huge.