January 23, 2008
Street Fights And Flashing Lights
Dundas Square gets a lot of flak for being a cold and soulless expanse of commercial neon and grey granite, and in a new music video for local singer-songwriter-producer Colin Munroe, it still is! But in this case, it's appropriate for his fantastic cover of Kanye West's mediocre "Flashing Lights" track.
Directed by Toronto-based street artist, musician, and director Philip Sportel, the super-low-budget video effectively dulls the square down into a generic, industrial, underpopulated space, but actually turns the ubiquitous videoboards (and a garbage bin) into something quite beautiful.
Just posted to Kanye West's blog and Perez Hilton, the video is bound to rapidly surpass the unexpected summer success of "World of Pain," Munroe's buzzworthy clip that stitched together 10,000 still photographs taken over two days in his attic. The homemade video helped attract the attention of Atlanta-based megaproducer Dallas Austin (Gwen Stefani, Janet Jackson, Pink, Madonna), who is now helping to facilitate the upcoming spring release of Munroe's first album, Don't Think Less Of Me (Marked Music).
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nice post. though I certainly don't agree that the original version is just 'mediocre'. but the new one is awesome, no doubt. very cool.
also, can we please stop shitting on the so very young dundas square? maybe we could give it some time to develop, and perhaps incorporate itself into the fabric of a downtown core that hasn't ever had a real identity to begin with anyway.
I'm just sayin'.
I think I still prefer Kanye's. (If anything, Munroe's version makes me appreciate how genius those strings samples are.) This version feels too––well––"cold and soulless."
I like both, just like them for different reasons, don't find one better than the other just different.
I actually like Dundas Square. They've pulled back a lot over the last year or two, but the biggest problem were the security guards, who would step in and boot you out if you looked like you're having too much fun, or remove you if you hadn't booked a permit and paid for your filthy hippie busking—which is why public squares should never be privately owned or operated as independent business ventures.
Note that a security guard makes a cameo appearance near the end there...
As for the original Kanye track, no matter how much you like it, I'll bet there's nobody who thinks it more earth-shatteringly brilliant than Kanye himself.
Isn't it sad that Kanye has become one of (if not the) best hip-hop artist these days ?!?
Kanye's video for the song is out. To say the least, it has far more T and substantial more A than this kid's.