James Franco is no stranger to music (or writing, or directing, or poetry, or video art, or invisible art, or male prostitution, or naked BMX biking…), and the last time he did something musical, it was a collaboration with cross-dressing R & B singer Kalup Linzy. Here’s a screencap from that collab:
More recently, he’s hooked up with Tim O’Keefe for a “Motown-inspired rock outfit” called Daddy. Their first video for “Love in the Old Days” (watch it below) features Franco’s Spring Breakers teenybopper co-stars – Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson – frolicking in the surf, all psychadelified like a kaleidoscope, while Franco slow croons a spoken word-ish track about Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams and his parents’ wedding. And if that wasn’t James Franco-y enough for you, this is how they describe themselves in the press release:
“According to Franco and O’Keefe, the motivation behind Daddy is to push beyond the sonic space of music into the surrounding ecology. Daddy investigates the territories of film/video, installation, and performance while simultaneously exploring the connections that form between them.”
Dick, meet nose. The only potentially problematic part of this project I envision is that the traditionalist, “decibel-positive” sonicscape they create may discourage the possibility of an inspired listener breaking down the fourth wall and creating their own internal sound palette, thereby unnecessarily limiting the scope of their art to the audible spectrum, in a quasi-fascistic imposition of the musician vis-a-vis the listener. Unless of course that was the point, as a comment on traditional methods of consumer-based capitalist ear-centric musicality. To create sound more creatively, ironically, may indeed be to create no sound at all. Discuss. (*upends rainstick, stuffs spaghettios up vagina*)