If you’re a creative type, you know that inspiration can strike at any time and at any place. Luckily for Foreign Legion, inspiration struck their video director, Behn Fannin, a few hundred feet in the air.
“He also has a day job, which is window washing,” Prozack Turner explained. “So evidently, he was washing windows 20 floors up on a hi rise residential building in downtown L.A. while listening to [‘Son Of A Gun’] over and over. As he was listening, looking into all these different windows, he noticed an old lady sitting in her apartment changing the channels relentlessly for about 30 minutes straight, never stopping on a channel more than two seconds. As he was washing the windows and bumping the track, the lady incoherently was changing the channels perfectly on beat with the song in his headphones. Right there, the concept hit him and he began writing the treatment on his phone, on a platform several hundred feet above the city.”
Fannin’s interpretation of that unidentified woman’s A.D.D. approach to channel surfing left Prozack Turner and Marc Stretch with a distinctive visual to coincide with the Tuesday release of their new album, Night Moves. Those who have been following Stretch and Prozack since the days of Kidnapper Van, shouldn’t be at all surprised to see bulky CRT televisions in place of their heads. At a time when the only thing separating most emcees is the color of their hipster-inspired sweaters, the pair said they both shun mainstream radio trends while pushing the evolution of their own sound and appearance.
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“We’ve approached [Night Moves] with a much broader vision than any of our previous records,” Marc Stretch added. “I, personally, was only really concerned with making great songs before. Now I’m much more involved in the entire creation process. The visuals have really become my area of responsibility, because that’s where my some of my other passions lie. Think back to the glory days of No Limit Records. Back then, I didn’t know one song from their 632-record catalog, but I knew a No Limit record on sight. They were the ones with the giant grizzly bears in silk robes driving diamond-encrusted speedboats on the front cover. Boom—instant brand and brand recognition!”
Unfortunately you won’t see any bears in iced-out boats in “Son Of A Gun.” But a close look reveals the dozens of movies and sitcoms Fannin incorporated into the video. In many cases he synced custom fonts (i.e. “Full House” and “The Simpsons”) to match with a particular line from each emcees rhyme. It all adds up to what Marc Stretch described as a simple idea with lots of rich layers involved in the execution. Apply that same mentality to a full album—one that Prozack produced the bulk of—and the result should be a product of two people who go to great lengths (sometimes even vertically) to stand out.
