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Tony Kaye |
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"All in Black, the Friends of Johnny Cash"
The new video to Johnny Cash's momentous deathbed recording of God's Gonna Cut You Down by the British filmmaker Tony Kaye is unlikely to be a kissing-under-the-mistletoe No 1 Christmas hit (except in gloomy households) but it is testament to the remarkable standing of the late country singer.
"He's now a mythical figure of American music who transcends rock, folk and gospel," says Bill Flanagan, writer and senior vice president of MTV Networks in New York. "He's bigger than the context in which his music was created. It happened to Sinatra, it happened in a way with the Beatles, it's happening with Miles Davis. If you're lucky enough to be an artist that transcends their time, the context falls away and the voice stands alone by itself."
For the last decade of his life, Cash was recorded by Rick Rubin, the grizzled LA-based music producer who excels in returning singers to a state of artistic purity. Cash began to present himself as the old man, shorn of affectation, full of vulnerability and sorrow, looking fearlessly at his own mortality.
The Cash-Rubin collaboration produced a series of albums that are among his most powerful. The pair worked intensely as Cash's end drew near; the album from which the song is taken, American V: A Hundred Highways, was recorded literally in the days before he died in 2003 at the age of 71.
The video is another hit for Kaye, the filmmaker known as much for his unusual projects as for his mercurial, child-like nature. After years doing award-winning commercials, he directed the highly regarded film American History X, later convinced the large and poorly actor Marlon Brando to play bongos in his rock band, and recently finished an epic documentary on America's relationship with abortion.
Acting on an idea given by Justin Timberlake, Kaye convinced Kate Moss, Kris Kristofferson, Lisa Marie Presley, Burt Bacharach, Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, Brian Wilson, Anthony Kiedis and some two dozen others to dress in black and mime to the camera.
This should come as no surprise: Cash, after all, is admired like few others. He cuts across racial, stylistic and generational boundaries; he's a symbol of authenticity that anyone would be pleased to identify with.
"In a polarised time, he demonstrates the power of independent-mindedness," says rock writer Anthony DeCurtis. "He was conservative in some ways, very liberal in other ways, but what he was all the time was nobody's dancing pony and you just don't find that much anymore."
Earlier this year, American V debuted at No 1 in the US; the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line was one of Hollywood's highest-grossing films last year and delivered actress Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for playing the part of Cash's wife, June Carter. Cash's elevation (Cash, a preacher, likely wouldn't see it that way) is complete. He's the sinner who was saved, the man in black.
"The American prototypes who most resemble Johnny Cash are John Wayne and Abraham Lincoln," says Flanagan. "By evolving into an amalgam of the Duke and the Great Emancipator, Cash really caught something fundamental and powerful in how Americans view themselves. He's red-state; he's blue-state. He truly walks the line."
View Entire Story Here
The new video to Johnny Cash's momentous deathbed recording of God's Gonna Cut You Down by the British filmmaker Tony Kaye is unlikely to be a kissing-under-the-mistletoe No 1 Christmas hit (except in gloomy households) but it is testament to the remarkable standing of the late country singer.
"He's now a mythical figure of American music who transcends rock, folk and gospel," says Bill Flanagan, writer and senior vice president of MTV Networks in New York. "He's bigger than the context in which his music was created. It happened to Sinatra, it happened in a way with the Beatles, it's happening with Miles Davis. If you're lucky enough to be an artist that transcends their time, the context falls away and the voice stands alone by itself."
For the last decade of his life, Cash was recorded by Rick Rubin, the grizzled LA-based music producer who excels in returning singers to a state of artistic purity. Cash began to present himself as the old man, shorn of affectation, full of vulnerability and sorrow, looking fearlessly at his own mortality.
The Cash-Rubin collaboration produced a series of albums that are among his most powerful. The pair worked intensely as Cash's end drew near; the album from which the song is taken, American V: A Hundred Highways, was recorded literally in the days before he died in 2003 at the age of 71.
The video is another hit for Kaye, the filmmaker known as much for his unusual projects as for his mercurial, child-like nature. After years doing award-winning commercials, he directed the highly regarded film American History X, later convinced the large and poorly actor Marlon Brando to play bongos in his rock band, and recently finished an epic documentary on America's relationship with abortion.
Acting on an idea given by Justin Timberlake, Kaye convinced Kate Moss, Kris Kristofferson, Lisa Marie Presley, Burt Bacharach, Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, Brian Wilson, Anthony Kiedis and some two dozen others to dress in black and mime to the camera.
This should come as no surprise: Cash, after all, is admired like few others. He cuts across racial, stylistic and generational boundaries; he's a symbol of authenticity that anyone would be pleased to identify with.
"In a polarised time, he demonstrates the power of independent-mindedness," says rock writer Anthony DeCurtis. "He was conservative in some ways, very liberal in other ways, but what he was all the time was nobody's dancing pony and you just don't find that much anymore."
Earlier this year, American V debuted at No 1 in the US; the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line was one of Hollywood's highest-grossing films last year and delivered actress Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for playing the part of Cash's wife, June Carter. Cash's elevation (Cash, a preacher, likely wouldn't see it that way) is complete. He's the sinner who was saved, the man in black.
"The American prototypes who most resemble Johnny Cash are John Wayne and Abraham Lincoln," says Flanagan. "By evolving into an amalgam of the Duke and the Great Emancipator, Cash really caught something fundamental and powerful in how Americans view themselves. He's red-state; he's blue-state. He truly walks the line."
View Entire Story Here