Rapper Gruff Lion of the Karma Kids collective has released a graphic two-part video for his songs “Animal” and “Clock Oven”.
The two tracks are from his death or evolution project, which is “a concept piece with each song a stroke to construct the whole.”
The Mike Petrow-directed video starts off with “Animal”, a rambunctious track which serves to “examine mankind’s base nature,” according to Gruff. He admits the song is “vulgar, visceral, [and] even offensive,” but felt it was necessary to “chew a raw nerve in the context of [death or evolution].”
The first half of the video matches the song’s coarseness, with a bloody Gruff toying with and biting at a dismembered deer carcass in the middle of the woods. As he roars that he’s a “glutton for a furry lioness” who would “kill his own brother if he’s fucking with” him, a woman stands stoically in the nude, seemingly as an antithesis to Gruff’s savagery.
The video references the unrefined depravity of prehistoric man, but the song’s lyrics highlight predatory, misogynistic ideology that still pervades modern man. They work in brilliant tandem to theorize that as far as modern medicine, technology and more have taken us, humanity hasn’t abandoned all of our prehistoric ideology.
The second half of the video, “Clock Oven”, depicts Gruff waking up from what appeared to be a dream, laying on an island. As he scrolls through his phone while walking through the area, Gruff gives humanity a wake-up call, declaring “you’ve lost your frequency” and questioning, “do you even have ideas or just like and share?”
Of the video’s second half, Gruff notes that, “my character wakes and immediately draws his phone to be lead mindlessly with blinders through a beautiful landscape. Eventually the phone is thrown to the sea and he begins to witness the earth that surrounds.”
Via e-mail he says that “we know better than to act as animals, yet we’re domesticated to the point that we feel entirely separate from the wilderness we left behind.”
Gruff notes that death or evolution searches for a “middle ground” between the two extremes.
It’s worth mentioning that no animals were harmed during the production of this video. The carcass parts were collected from the scraps of a deer hunter.
