Featured photograph by William Murray
Premiering on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 is the third single from Zachary Allan Starkey’s album titled DIY. Starkey explains his inspiration behind the work below.
“RATS is the third single from my solo album DIY.
“That is what I feel like, I feel like this insignificant rat just struggling to to survive amongst millions of other rats.”
I wrote the song RATS after an especially bad day at work. Like most people, I have a very stressful, demanding job where I do too much work and am extremely underpaid. Every time that you go to work and your boss cusses you out and harasses you for no reason other than to enhance their own ego, you close your eyes and say to yourself, “At least I have a job, it is better than not having a job.” Despite working 40 or more hours a week and still struggling to pay your rent and bills because wages have been stagnant for the better part of a decade, you close your eyes and say to yourself, “At least I have a job.”
You try to look for other jobs, but everyone else is looking too, and it is like we are all crammed into this tunnel, running, looking for work, hoping to make enough money to survive, millions of people, of all ages, scrambling, living like this. You put up with endless amounts of vocal and emotional abuse from your boss because even though you are barely making enough money at work, you cannot afford to quit. You have to just keep running.
This has been the situation I have been in for the past 5 or 6 years, and no matter how hard I work or try to find new opportunities, I always end up working for some selfish, arrogant, nasty, petty, vicious jerk who has a “Job Creator” complex and thinks he is God’s gift to everything. I am just one of millions of young people stuck in this situation.
One night, after an especially horrible day at work, I was standing on the subway platform in the JZ station at Canal Street, watching these rats run around in the gutter by the tracks, and I thought, “That is what I feel like, I feel like this insignificant rat just struggling to to survive amongst millions of other rats.”
So I went home and I wrote the song, RATS.
On my records, I write all of the music and play all of the instruments, and I co-produce and mix the tracks with an audio engineer. For RATS and my DIY album, that engineer was a guy named Brian Lee Smith, and we recorded the entire album at night in a freezing basement studio off Myrtle Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Musically, RATS is very much inspired by the music of Bobby O. Bobby O was a producer in New York City in the early 1980’s. He made this really dirty sounding, arpeggiated electronic dance music that sounded like the work of Giorgio Moroder on steroids. His music was really innovative and he worked with people like Divine and the Pet Shop Boys. The Bobby O sound came to define a sound known as HI-NRG.
So when I wrote RATS, I incorporated the Bobby O/HI-NRG influence into the song, using dirty arpeggiated synth bass lines and putting some Moroder-esque melodies over top of them. I punked up the song a little bit by speeding it up a bit, and I put a punky synth solo over the break, because I wanted the song to have the frantic, manic feel of the lyrics, of trying to survive in a perpetual rat race.
HI-NRG music was often heard in Leather bars back in the early 80’s, so I wanted to incorporate a sort of shiny, leather heavy, almost Tom of Finland look into the video for RATS. I am into that sort of look and feel anyways, the outfit that I am wearing in the RATS video is pretty much my everyday uniform and has been since high school.
I also wanted the video to feature some people other than myself, while keeping in the with leather theme, and I wanted there to be a sense of androgyny in the video. So I asked my friends Chris Konnaris and Angie Chuang to be in the video with me.
Chris is a model of incredible presence, she has this incredible natural swagger, the presence of a 1950’s movie star or Frank Sinatra. She’s also a very nice, awesome person and I have been wanting to involve her with my work for a while now. This video seemed like the perfect opportunity.
Angie Chuang is an incredibly talented fashion designer and also a friend. She has a very cool style of her own. About a month ago, Angie and I were out dancing, and because we both had similar haircuts and were wearing similar outfits, we sort of looked like mirrors of each other, which I thought was cool. So I asked her to be in the video as well.
The three of us had a lot of fun pretending to me…I don’t know, drugged up models/drug dealers while William shot us.
William Murray directed the RATS video, he also directed the music videos for my singles Into the Sun and We’re All Fucked! He is a genius and excellent at taking my visual concepts for the videos and translating them into beautiful compositions. His editing is stellar. We both wanted a very Film Noir look to the scenes with Angie and Chris, so William lit us with a single while light, which he moved around while he danced. The shadowplay element was inspired by the work of Laurie Anderson, who is one of my favorite performance artists.
For the other segments of the video, William and I went to Chinatown. One of the lines in RATS is “In bright, neon lights, rats run at night”, and what better place is there in NYC for neon lights than Chinatown? So we went down to Chinatown at night and shot some stuff around East Broadway.
As I said, I write all of the music and play all of the instruments on my recordings, but I have a live band (collectively known as ZAS) for concerts, and in the video, you can see some shots from a recent concert we did at The Paper Box in Bushwick. That is Jo-Anne Hyun, Laura Holden, and Ben Pagano onstage with me.”
For additional information please visit Zachery on Facebook and Tumblr.
Check out some other videos by this artist below:
