This was the first promo music video Jonathan Glazer would direct. After a successful music video career of directing such bands as Radiohead and Blur, he would leave promo videos behind and begin a successful film career before returning to promo video directing after a hiatus of nearly six years in 2006 by directing Massive Attack’s Live With Me.
The video for Karmacoma references many famous Hollywood horror films most noticeable “The Shining”.
Karmacoma is one of the first examples (of many pop promo videos to come), to use dialogue and sound effects throughout the video to tell a story.
Some scenes in the video for Karmacoma were censored when shown on TV promoting the single release at the time. These scenes (or shots) were – the man standing on the bed with the big pointed piercing in his tongue, the dark-haired woman getting a nose bleed, the gunman’s duplicate pointing the gun at himself and the man covered in oil slowly removing his finger out of his navel.
massive attack on working with director Johnathon Glazer
3D about working with Jonathan Glazer – “We had seen some of his stuff he had done in advertising and he came recommended and obviously we just really got on with him and we talked about films, which is the most important thing to reference really for us. We don’t really normally go into songs with a complete vision of a video or a trailer for it as we don’t normally write that way. Most things come about in the studio in quite a haphazard or an abstract way. You don’t think about as a picture or a story, so you don’t necessarily have a story in terms of the visuals to go with it. So it was good to meet someone who has references you can relate to and vice-versea. And with Jonathan that was the case, really.” [Mirrorball TV Documentary - November 1999]
3D about the director Jonathan Glazer – “We met up with Jonathan Glazer who was doing ads at the time and Karmacoma was his first venture into doing promo videos. Obviously he’s directing movies like Sexy Beast and Radiohead videos now.” [The Raft - November 2001]
my thoughts
I think the videos got quite a bizarre and strange atmosphere about it, it looks as though its an extract of a film because of the style of cinematography and obviously also because the director has purposefully imitated parts of other films within the music video. The tone seems sinister and tense, cackling and the muttering of numbers can be heard over the track. The more you watch of the video the more surreal it seems, From watching it I think you can feel almost a trapped feeling, in a hotel corridor with various scenes taking place in different rooms - some seemingly disturbing.
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