“Like most singers, I had a feeling of not being listened to. I have never met a star who didn’t come from insecurity. It’s the things that are missing that make you a star. It’s not the things that you have.”
—George Michael
The Musicians (Dave Gahan) 2022
41 min
In 1988, Depeche Mode was the subject of the music documentary 101. The film, shot by veteran rock documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, was a capsule of the band's legendary final concert for their 1988 album tour, Music for the Masses at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. Upon closer inspection of 101, Masha Tupitsyn reworks the concert footage to reveal not just a portrait of a band, or a devoted fan base, but a gifted and anxious lead singer, for whom the landmark event represented both a breakthrough and a breakdown. The Musicians, a video series on the temporality and hidden testimony of music, carefully studies Dave Gahan’s haunting and dynamic Rose Bowl performance, revealing the hallucinatory chasm between a performer’s interiority and exteriority; the public singing voice and the inaudible inner voice. Tupitsyn unearths and pieces together 30 years of press interviews with Gahan about his fatal drug overdose in 1996--during which time he was clinically dead for two minutes--as well as his memories of Rose Bowl, creating an alternate audio track for the concert. Tupitsyn constructs Gahan’s inner voice as a druggy, suicidal, apparitional pitch that crosses the boundaries of time--portending and enacting its own destiny and doom. While 101 shows us a beautiful, young rockstar enjoying and weathering his success at the height of his creative powers, The Musicians--an auditory landscape that plays upon the phrase "hearing voices," an idiom for madness—moves between the past and the future, the audible and inaudible, the voice and the face, life and death, to listen to the emotional, psychological, and spiritual muteness that is often required to perform on a world stage.
The Musicians (Michael Jackson) 2022
1hr 01 min
"Nothing is more disorienting than things, people, morphing before your eyes, changing identities, not being known. And this is the perpetual nausea of the age."
—Celia Farber
Michael Jackson’s 1983 Thriller video launches a thematic and lyrical obsession with physical alteration, doubling, splitting, and morphing that would come to dominate the rest of Jackson's career. While offstage, these transitions from one alter to another were driven by a trajectory of radical cosmetic surgery, which Jackson always denied, in Thriller and later music videos, he repeatedly reenacted various kinds of bodily transmogrifications onscreen. Jackson's alterations took various forms—human, inhuman, supernatural. His haunted pop-lyrics and schizoid videos--most notably Thriller (1983), Ghosts (1996), and the "panther dance" of Black or White (1991)--reveal a star that was in a constant state of moral agony and physical decay from the moment he reached the pinnacle of success with Thriller, begging the question: is fame just a process of ruin and damnation? And is genius always corrupted and violated by the ghouls and handlers of hedonistic capitalism? In the second installment of The Musicians, Masha Tupitsyn charts Michael Jackson's running theme of metamorphosis, reworking the deceptively euphoric pitch and tempo of his discography in order to track the uncanny evolution of his transfiguration, as well as his horrific entrapment within the ghastly, vampiric schematic of late 20th century predatory celebrity.