Pitchfork Forkcast: Video: El-P: "Smithereens (Stop Crying)"

Video: El-P: "Smithereens (Stop Crying)"

This video's been kicking around for a few months, having premiered on The New York Times website back in March. But even if the hype talk for El-P's pretty-damn-solid I'll Sleep When You're Dead has died down, this clip isn't easy to shake from your rearview. Directed by Cassidy Gearhart in a brutal, restless but often disconcertingly elegant visual style, this video falls in a bizarre gray area between Eli Roth and Hype Williams, a Gitmo-esque detention-and-torture scenario depicted in immaculately-overcranked slow motion, all crystalline liquid and balletic brutality.

A few of the shots combine horror and beauty in uncomfortable ways: the opening shot of El-P's head getting pulled from a tank of water, flinging an arc of droplets off his scalp; another face-down shot of his head being submerged in the tank with blood swirling around the water like some sort of Andres Serrano photo, starkly backlit shots of the MC pinned to the concrete by a jackboot while lens flares dart across his face. And the damnedest thing is how Steve McQueen El looks: in the face of all this torture, he maintains this battered but defiant facade, occasionally smirking fatalistically as he spits. There's this one moment where he's just glowering at his captors, sneering with a cigarette clenched in his teeth; if it weren't for the soundtrack you'd probably be able to hear him snarl "I ain't telling you shit."

Video: > El-P: ""Smithereens (Stop Crying)""
[from I'll Sleep When You're Dead; out now on Def Jux]