How was it made?
I made the beat and melodic line for “Add the Heart” in a Neuköln, Berlin cafe in October 2022 using only my laptop DAW. My initial goal was to write melodic lines — all in different musical keys — that were determined to ignite chaos. This dissonant environment was also supposed by two conflicting time signatures — 4/4 and 6/8 — slapped together into a catchy & repetitive yet teetering groove.
I started writing the lyrics shortly after I went home to Chicago the next month. Upon my return, I was struck by the cultural differences between contemporary Europe and the home I always knew. I saw an America that valued a pure consumer ethic of sensationalism and materialism over genuine expression; the loss of an artist’s self in this “experiment gone wrong.” And I saw the systemic injustices upholding these flawed principles: racism, protectionism, etc.
The music video merges sampled public domain footage, Processing-generated visuals, and original cinematography with the Fluxus ethos. Its visual continuity dissects the complex history of systemic inequality in America. I threaded these ostensibly disjointed visuals through a personalized editing style, balancing my own ethics and ambitions with the seemingly incompatible demands of a complex outer world. The music provided the perfect, ever-shifting platform for dynamic interplay among sampling, classical music elements, and the deliberately oversaturated digital atmosphere. It’s a critical polemic that ultimately argues for more empathy.
The technical aspects of the music & video for “Add the Heart” reflected a huge inflection point for my audio and video editing skills to that point. I was using software and technology I had never encountered before. Some of the visual outputs in particular were particularly gruesome to layer & code. I wanted them to look both crude and appetizing. I wanted the audience to be unable to look away, yet somehow completely repulsed by something that wasn’t traditionally “explicit.” The lyrics and visual continuities both engage in a dynamic interplay that would be impossible to replicate twice in the same way. My later works have also spoken about things such as systemic racism, or the digital era’s normalization of oversaturated information streams — but none with the same raw, almost naive grit of “Add the Heart.”
Lyrics
Art's
Not
Vain
It's
Caged
My money's legs are on the briefcase
Pulp Fiction allure
Leave it to the court
Peeking through the blinds
Love
Class
Guns
War
More?
As you hold me down, please carve your
Callous in my hand, word to the bones
Mad science shit. Human, no flaws
Guts from the grinder, voices in the tomes
Cancer in a cure; 40 acre plots
Play the game and rot, don't and pay the cost
Your dung imbues the land with hope.
Trust me to believe the
TV host's a listenin'
Generations fishin'
Skins from the elixir
Molded to the crux
Diamond is the rough now
It's your police baton, the digest
The art is stuck behind the old man
The man is stuck inside an old dance
Can I tell his story
Sans conflicting tastes or
Tainted edicts strolling
Irrigated faith?
Who should I appease to
Keep their lies and change
Sown in my estate yet
Hidden from your gaze?
Am I the artist of your mention
To preach a silent misdirection?
I'm about to become a star
I've been waiting my whole life for this
I remember cutting the mold off my bread!
To find the endless supply at the core
Beyond the lead pipes in my wall
Where odorless springs flow directly into my conscience
I felt the Earth gestate as though it was my child
I had found the perfect painting
In the oil that gushes through my playthings
Pavements of red carpet, jungles of friendly fauna I tame
They make survival the chore of my routine
Every step worth a grain
In an hourglass that bends time & space
This Metropolis is for you, for me
Man and machine. One and the same
Fortune in a twist
Everyone's a cop
Tracking every step
We have a rabbit and he's
Shot!
Take the story of a broke ass kid
Deflated and defeated writin' soapy ass licks
He basted his waves, scaled up to the brink
But now he's just an old man, groaning at the sink
Building his own
Age of the crow
Teetering slow
Plank-picket strolls
Lord of the Clones
Money is god
Change in the plot
Take the story of a broke ass kid
Deflated and defeated writin' soapy ass licks
He basted his waves, scaled up to the brink
But now he's just an old man, groaning at the sink.
Who could've been a star if the Minstrel didn't spread?
The red lines of experts put the artist in the pen
You won't see the flags for the blood makes amends
The theater of collusion we diffuse and defend
The borders of the text, do we cross them or pretend?
Or do we starve the distance from the banker to the tramp?
The legal code of power is the means to the end
For liberty the man's, but the unit of its flesh
My plumage in its beauty overtakes you through
Demand, I demand the rights to make you make it work
The work I see is wrapped inside the egg you made from scratch
The turntable blues they will redact
The heart of youth intact.
© Nick Zazove