Inside Julian Casablancas’ Post-Apocalyptic New Video ‘Human Sadness’
Julian Casablancas sees the valor in going down with the ship. For “Human Sadness” – the apocalyptically themed new video from the Strokes singer’s other group, the Voidz – he took inspiration from the Titanic’s eight-member orchestra, who are said to have played until their deaths.
“It just seemed like a fitting concept,” Casablancas tells Rolling Stone. “The world’s gonna end and you decide to play music. That’s basically what happened on the Titanic and in a weird, dark, ‘sad’ way – forgive me – it’s kind of like life: dark. But you can look at life as ‘managing denial.'”
The gritty-looking video is a 13-minute head-trip, intertwining different vignettes of desperation, survivalism and heroism all connected by the song. The group performs the track live in the video, making for a different take than the one on last year’s Tyranny LP. Each of the Voidz members contributed images that came to them while making the record, which they dramatized in the video between stock images of war and sex. The scenes make for pre-apocalyptic flashbacks that fit into a larger narrative that plays out over the lengthy clip.
“The idea of each band member having his own story is always there for me,” the singer says. “But it’s always hard in a short video. So this was the chance.”
One of the clip’s directors, Warren Fu, tells Rolling Stone that he and Casablancas have been conceptualizing the “Human Sadness” clip since the end of 2013, when he began compiling possible band-member storylines into storyboards. When they began production on the video, they worked with three different directing teams, led by co-director Nicholaus Goosenn and photography duo Wiissa, in New York City, upstate New York, Downtown Los Angeles and Oxnard, California. “Some of the conceptual ideas are there for an entertainment factor, but underlying the band narratives are personal problems, and we wanted to loosely present those within an overall broader scope of world issues,” Fu says.
“The idea of each band member having his own story is always there for me,” Casablancas says. “But it’s always hard in a short video. So this was the chance.”
For his flashback scenes – or “memory movies,” to use his phrase – Casablancas appears as a “deli store clerk,” at Goossen’s suggestion, and also cavorts with a woman on a beach (played by Casablancas’ wife, Juliet). There are also scenes of him watching TV, seeing the war footage to dramatize how the world came to an end.
Connecting it all are shots of each member playing in a white room while wearing sunglasses that have been painted over with white, a nod to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science album cover, but also a commentary on technology. “Everyone in this future had their own entertainment going,” Casablancas says. “From there, we just had fun with it.”
Most of the band members figured out what they wanted to do. “Amir [Yaghmai] always wanted to do a solo in a swirling hurricane,” Casablancas says of one of the Voidz’s guitarists. Meanwhile, he says the group’s bassist, Jake Bercovici, “always jokes about being the ‘man down’ if we were in a war – the guy who gets shot and says, ‘You guys just go on without me.'” (Nevertheless, the wounded soldier role went to guitarist Jeramy Gritter.)