‘Last Cup of Sorrow’: When Faith No More went full Alfred Hitchcock
Korean-American music video director Joseph Kahn is about as A-list as it gets in his little corner of the entertainment industry. His résumé speaks for itself: Destiny Child’s ‘Say My Name’, Eminem’s ‘Without Me’, Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’, Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’, even that new, unnecessary version of Mariah’s Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ video from a few years ago. The man is a big-budget, top 40 video maestro. He also once directed, by no particular coincidence, an incredible Faith No More video that went comparatively unnoticed by the world.
The summer of 1997 was a weird time for both Kahn and the band. The relationship between singer Mike Patton and the rest of FNM was rapidly deteriorating—nothing new there, really—but the relatively surprising success of the band’s latest album kept them strung together. That record titled Album of the Year, more for the sake of irony than ego, led to a long world tour, capped off by an American leg that found loyal FNM fans angrily booing the band’s opening act—an upstart rap-metal outfit by the name of Limp Bizkit. By the following spring, Patton was out the door, and FNM would go dormant for the next decade.
Joseph Kahn, meanwhile, was just 25 years old and already one of the rising stars of the music video world. His early work, mostly with hip-hop acts like Geto Boys, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and Warren G, had now made him an in-demand choice in the pop and rock worlds, as well. And so, in the span of a few months, in 1997, Kahn was assigned the task of framing and defining two disparate but soon-to-be huge groups as they broke the mainstream, directing both Korn’s ‘ADIDAS’ and the Backstreet Boys’ ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’ videos. In between those jobs, like a fever dream inside a fever dream, he found himself in San Francisco helping FNM make an Alfred Hitchcock-inspired video for their single ‘Last Cup of Sorrow.’
“I always thought Vertigo had an interesting music-video feel to it,” Kahn told Billboard shortly after the video’s release, “Because of the [rich graphics] in the film. Also, the idea of Mike Patton playing Jimmy Stewart seemed funny to me. Basically you’re taking this really subversive person and putting him in this clean, sterile, technicolor ‘50s world, yet pieces of the subversiveness of his persona keep coming through this world. It’s like blending an old film with this totally weird ‘90s type of guy.”
That’s a pretty spot-on description of the ‘Last Cup of Sorrow’ video, which is both a parody and homage to Hitchcock’s 1958 film. Along with its striking visuals and bold exploration of obsession and disorientation (literal and metaphorical), Vertigo also stands as one of the finest cinematic depictions of FNM’s hometown of San Francisco, so the concept of using it for inspiration had immediate appeal.
“We usually pick the [music video idea] that’s the least bad,” FNM bassist, Billy Gould, told Billboard. “But in this case, the idea sounded pretty good. And when we got to the shoot and met Joseph, we knew it was a good thing. He’s a cool dude. We very much had the same vision, which is really rare. It made for a situation in which we felt we were actually creating something together.”
The ‘Last Cup of Sorrow’ shoot, which included Hollywood actor Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Kim Novak part, incorporated plenty of the original settings from Vertigo, along with some very amusing re-creations of some of the film’s famous spiraling graphics, with Patton’s disembodied head singing in the center of the vortex.
“Personally, I think Hitchcock would have liked the sense of humour,” Kahn said.
On the other hand, for Faith No More, it might have been the last cup of laughs they had together for a while.
