The classic horror reference in Massive Attack’s ‘Karmacoma’
Massive Attack’s ‘Karmacoma’ boasts one of the trip-hop outfit’s strangest music videos: a surreal journey into a ghostly hotel haunted by classic movie references. It was filmed at County Hall, nestled on London’s south bank. By the time Jonathon Glazer settled on the opulent governmental building, it had already appeared as a backdrop in Jules Dassin’s noir thriller Night and The City, Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.
By that time, Glazer was undertaking his first music video project. The Massive Attack video was a chance for him to demonstrate his talents, and it largely paid off. He would go on to work with some of the biggest acts of the 1990s and early 2000s, including Blur, Radiohead, Nick Cave and Jamiroquai. Of course, these days, Glazer is best known for his work on films like Sexy Beast, Birth, and Under The Skin.
Judging from the many classic film references that litter the ‘Karmacoma’ video, it’s clear Glazer has his heart set on the big screen from the beginning. Explaining how the video came together during a conversation with Mirrorball TV in 1999, 3D said: “We had seen some of his stuff he had done in advertising, and he came recommended, and obviously we just really got on with him, and we talked about films, which is the most important thing to reference really for us.”
The ‘Karmacoma’ video is essentially one long tribute to contemporary cinema. It’s filled with knowing nods to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and The Coen Brother’s Barton Fink. But perhaps the most obvious reference of all is to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror, The Shining, a film that made the prospect of staying in a luxury hotel nightmarish at best.
As well as taking place inside Kubrick’s The Overlook hotel, the video also features a brief cameo from two of its most terrifying ghosts: the blood-soaked twins. You could even argue the video adheres to the same paranormal philosophy that makes The Shining so unnerving in that it views environments as capable of absorbing human (in this case, filmic) life.
It’s possible Glazer was trying to reconfigure Massive Attack’s approach to sampling in a filmic context. ‘Karmacoma’ is a patchwork of musical references comprised of songs by a range of artists. The undulating, dubby bassline, for example, is taken from ‘Melody’ from Serge Gainsbourg’s cult album Histoire de Melody Nelson, while the throat-singing sample was plucked from ‘Dream Time in Lake Jackson’ by The KLF. There’s also a melodic refrain at 0.54 taken from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. In his video, Glazer sought to construct a visual world using this same ethos of reappropriation. It worked a treat.
