Rx With Deviant Video Prescriptions

The story starts as a sort of Fear and Loathing on the Anti-Campaign Trail in Las Vegas. Two YouTube-savvy, artistically inclined brothers — “Rx” and Dan, both of The Party Party, and both of whom prefer to withhold their last name due to professed paranoia — are working on a documentary of the 2008 election. They to head to Las Vegas for the mid-November CNN Democratic Debate, where they meet Democratic presidential candidate and ex-Senator Mike Gravel, who has been barred from participating in the debate because he hadn’t raised the requisite $1 million. The Party Party approach him about doing an interview and music video, and soon both a psychedelic, peace-mongering music video is shot and an ongoing political and artistic relationship is formed.

NewTeeVee caught Rx on the phone from Los Angeles, where he and Gravel were attending a political rally: “One of the reasons we’re making the documentary is to show people you can do it,” he told us. “You can get a major political figure in a room to make a music video. You’ve just got to want to do it and make a phone call. Just the same you can run for political office, like Mike Gravel.”

And this isn’t the first move of techno-political genius from the Alaskan ex-senator. When Gravel was barred by CNN, he decided to host his own debate. He answered all the same questions and even bantered with the other candidates by projecting the CNN feed onto a giant screen behind him in a sort of Mystery Political Science Theater 2007. He even Ustreamed the whole thing.

The result of their collaboration, a product of “DJ Mike Gravel & Rx Paranoia,” is merely the first in a series of videos with the ex-senator. While all of the footage being shot now is for the documentary, much of it will appear on YouTube as it gets edited together. Where the final documentary will be exhibited isn’t sure yet, but Rx said he’d be equally comfortable if it found an audience in a theater or online. The latest effort of the team is expected to hit YouTube on Monday.

The Party Party pranksters found a kindred spirit in Gravel. Rx, for example, had wanted to do a video using “Give Peace a Chance,” but Gravel was set on doing “Power to the People.” The resulting Lennon-on-Lennon crashup was the only logical conclusion.

The Party Party “crashups” are exercises in sensory and socio-political history overload. The videos are patched together from hundreds of archival sources of famous speeches, recut and remixed to show world leaders belting out poignant lyrics. While Godard, speaking about movies, once said that “every edit is a lie,” with The Party Party’s slicing, every edit kills a lie. Best known for their crashup of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” The Party Party took President Bush’s State of the Union Address and have him “singing” Bono’s lamentations. The Party Party’s most recent crashup is a Bushie rendition of R.E.M.’s lyrically challenging “It’s the End of the World.”

Rx tells us that it is Dan who is often the one combing through hundreds of hours of archival footage, online and otherwise, for quality source material. “Finding it can be its own fiasco,” Rx explained. “Some of it is online, lots of it on TV, it’s about being vigilant and watching a lot of CSPAN and PBS.”

But The Party Party doesn’t plan on stopping with just one under-represented fringe candidate. “We’re trying to line something up with Ron Paul and Kucinich,” Rx said excitedly. As the the election moves through the primaries, it will be exciting to see what sorts of Gonzo video antics The Party Party can perpetrate with various candidates.

With its re-purposing of some of the greatest oratory of the 20th century, The Party Party’s work is a fascinating historical video mural. Cobbling together a video from hundreds of sources, the final products are extremely nuanced in their editing and cram an immense amount of meaning into a tight, four-minute clip. Ahead of the release of their final documentary, we’ll be sure to see what new political figures have taken the plunge and sipped the Kool-Aid with The Party Party along the way.

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