This October, Daily Grindhouse is celebrating the collision between music and horror with a series of posts under the banner of Rocktoberfest 2019. There will be daily features, recurring bits, and some special posts around the subject.
Mourning Jams is your daily kick off every morning with a different music video that has some horror elements to it. Crossing genres, decades, and more, it’s a good way to get in the spooky mood this Halloween month.
In honor of their new album, There Existed An Addiction To Blood, coming out today from Sub Pop Records, here’s another video from the supergroup that kicked off Mourning Jams, clipping. Daveed Diggs, Jonathan Snipes, and William Hutson return with another dope video for a song called “Blood Of The Fang” off their upcoming album. It’s a funky visual trip directed by Lars Jan with moments of terror, plenty of commentary, and the album’s title used as a loop coming from the incredible 1973 black vampire art film, GANJA & HESS. According to the band:
The “Blood of the Fang” video is inspired by a photo of Huey Newton — co-founder of The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense — hand-cuffed to a hospital gurney while being treated for a gunshot wound in the abdomen after a gun battle with Oakland police in October 1967.
The song itself is built around a sample from Sam Waymon’s score to the 1973 experimental vampire film ‘Ganja & Hess.’ Daveed Diggs’s lyrics conjure an alternate history of black political struggle in the 1960s and 70s, name-dropping radical activists and reimagining them as a pantheon of undead superheroes fighting against systems of oppression.
The group has plenty of horror bonafides already with Snipes and Hutson composing various scores and pieces of music together and separately for ROOM 237, THE NIGHTMARE, STARRY EYES, and much more. Diggs of course was brilliant on Broadway in Hamilton, turned in an all-time performance in BLINDSPOTTING (also about Oakland, race, and America’s less than great history), but genre folk may know him best from VELVET BUZZSAW. It’s a tour de force video with lots of surprising moments and weird elements, frenetic lighting and bold colors, combining with the great music and powerful lyrics. Plus this happens:
Tune in tomorrow and every morning in October for a new music video to help start the day on the frightening foot as Halloween swiftly approaches.
Tags: Black Panther, Blood Of The Fang, clipping., Daveed Diggs, Ganja & Hess, Huey Newton, Jonathan Snipes, Lars Jan, Oakland, Sam Waymon, Sub Pop, There Existed An Addiction To Blood, William Hutson
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