So as you may have heard, Death Cab For Cutie has a new album out at the end of the month titled Codes and Keys. The band recently posted the video for the first single, “Home Is A Fire,” onto YouTube, and it’s got a sort of interesting backstory to it: the video former street artist Shepard Fairey, whose manipulation of an image of Obama snapped by an AP photographer spread like wildfire across the web in 2008, turning him into a bit of a household name.
Fairey, who’s famous for designing the Obama Hope poster during his presidential campaign, made his name by slapping his Andre the Giant stickers across public spaces, which helped popularize (and legitimize) street art in the ’90s.
He employs a similar tactic for Death Cab’s video, emblazoning various concrete city walls with singer Ben Gibbard’s lyrics. The resulting video manages to turn the ugliest of city spaces into eye-popping pieces of art. “We wanted the viewer to experience the urban environment in a very real and intimate way that celebrates that one person’s war is another’s beauty mark,” Fairey told BoingBoing.
Here’s the sort of hypnotic video, which I think ends up coming off as a beautiful love letter to Los Angeles, taking note of the fact that it’s always on the cusp of potential earthquake disaster…
(Pic via)
