You’d be forgiven for thinking Mykki Blanco doesn’t have much time for music these days. From running their own label called Dogfood, compiling a compilation for the label’s first release, coming out about being HIV Positive, constantly campaigning for just about every marginalised group’s rights, and just being a general badass who refuses to be quiet – yeah, you’d be forgiven for thinking that.
However, just a few months ago, Blanco released the huge, uncompromising, relentless monster of a track that is Coke White, Starlight, and now she’s released a short film to accompany it.
Definitely her most artistic video yet, the clip spans for nearly 8 minutes and is pretty intense to say the least. There are a few different readings one could see with this one, but what I think is going on is Blanco documenting several realisations/awakenings/epiphanies from a drug-induced almost coma. Slipping in and out of consciousness in a hotel room with a bunch of other people, some liquid from a dropper are put into her mouth and she succumbs to the drug. From there, several scenes all run parallel with each other. Running down the street in heels, a dress and a blond wig before giving up, sitting down and taking off her wig; traipsing through a forest before stopping to get fully dressed up with makeup and a wig before setting off with an axe and swimming in a creek; swimming through a cave into the ocean in a dress before finding and stabbing an octopus and holding it up triumphantly. Like I said, intense.
The clip ends mysteriously with a “To Be Continued”, but Blanco gave some insight to Dazed about this first instalment. Intended to “allude to the darker side of ‘gay life’,” with director Tristan Patterson adding that he felt like “setting Mykki against the birthplace of western civilization was a potentially interesting juxtaposition.”
Mykki elaborated on her feelings of the messages behind this video saying, “We wanted to allude to the darker side of ‘gay life’, (with) a stylised portrayal of perhaps what most heterosexual people don’t see. Right now in London and New York there is a bit of an epidemic going on with loads of gays taking drugs and having chemsex sessions. The hedonism is so 80s, but the whole thing is extremely lonely and unhealthy, with most of it happening on gay hook-up apps. I get tired of the ‘World Against the Homosexual’ motif, so I wanted to make reference to how the LGBTQ (community) can also eat itself alive sometimes rather than unifying.”
There is no word yet on when the next part of this will come, but in the same Dazed interview Blanco spoke of a forthcoming album and a potential feature film with Patterson.