When listening to “Dead or Alive” by Kansas City-based indie band 24hr Video, it’s impossible not to think about legendary Kansas City musician Charlie “Bird” Parker. The song (just like Parker’s life) is about the ambivalence of living on the razor’s edge between life and death, between drug dependency and freedom. While Parker’s drug of choice was heroin, “Dead or Alive” talks about prescription med abuse.
So come on, be stupid, pick the bottle up,
Wash away your buspirone
The song’s captivating melody – written by lead vocalist Nolan DeBrincat – proves that 24hr Video is too talented to get boxed into nebulous categories like “shoegaze” or “noise rock.” The song sounds like a slightly more morose version of Radiohead. DeBrincat uses his voice like an extra instrument, much like Thom Yorke. Plus “Dead or Alive” is musically inventive, with a lot of minor third and minor sixth chords that are anything but “noise.”
The song features interesting interplay between the guitar and keys, propelled by DeBrincat’s hypnotic vocal. The lyric reveals that Kansas City, like almost all U.S. cities, has an underbelly that visitors never see.
It’s a goddamn shame
What happened to this place
Klonopin and crack cocaine
I can barely see your face
The prolific DeBrincat reportedly wrote about ten albums’ worth of songs before releasing a 10-song debut collection just as Covid hit. “Dead or Alive” from the group’s second album clearly demonstrates that 24hr Video is very much alive, exhibiting lyrical prowess and musical ingenuity that deserve wider recognition.
Your band name comes from the album artwork on Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief. How were you influenced by that group?
Radiohead was the first “rock” act that I ever really connected with. I remember hearing them for the first time in high school when I was driving somewhere with my dad; I had fallen asleep in the car and woke up to “high and dry” playing on the radio and I was instantly hooked by Thom’s eerie and ethereal vocal performance. While I was writing the songs for Motion In Pictures though, I was actually a lot more inspired by the work of their engineer, Nigel Godrich. One of the first things I do when I discover a new band or album I like is I immediately look up who was involved in the mixing/mastering process and then I try to find out if they have some sort of online blog. That’s one thing that made Radiohead so accessible to me I think is that there were entire websites dedicated to finding out how Jonny made certain noises on his guitar and what Nigel did with them, that sort of thing.
I also really resonate with the themes of Radiohead, of alienation from one’s self and from others in a fast paced world. That was originally the idea when writing songs for Motion In Pictures, was to write songs that reflected a lot of economic and cultural anxieties I had at the time. “Quiet, Now” is told from the perspective of a computer that destroys the world Y2K style. “Rotten Fruit” is about class conflict in the banana republics and slave labor camps of Latin America. “Repetition” is about the struggle to materialize your human drive towards creativity in a world that’s sort of not really interested in that. I try to tie in big picture ideas with my own personal experiences that people who, at risk of sounding cheesy here, society has maybe “left behind” can relate to.
24hr Video’s music doesn’t fit into pat categories like “shoegaze,” “math rock” or “noise rock.” How would you describe your music?
I would describe my music as the “logical conclusion” to whatever mix of noises I’m listening to at the moment. Usually there are three or four albums or artists that pull and tug on the general sound of 24hr video, like horses drawing and quartering a medieval peasant. When I began writing Motion In Pictures though, I was super into yacht rock and neo soul, even though I didn’t listen to any of that music? If you asked me to name a single yacht rock or neo soul band I would not be able to—maybe Steely Dan haha. I didn’t really listen to any of that kind of music at all, I just liked the “idea” of the sound for some reason. And that’s best reflected in songs like “Motion In Pictures” or “Repetition” or “Dead Or Alive”, where I was super into fat crunchy drum sounds and running every instrument through a rotary speaker. I didn’t really get into shoegaze until about halfway through the writing process of the album, so I think it’s a very interesting counterbalance between two wildly different sounds. If I had to pick a genre to put my music into though, I would have to go with noise rock or album rock.
In “Dead or Alive,” what are you trying to say about prescription meds like Klonopin and buspirone?
I was born with a perfectly normal brain. I have ADHD and struggle with mild PTSD but other than that, my brain is perfectly normal and healthy. Around the end of 2020 though I started developing severe and uncontrollable anxiety. I would have multiple panic attacks a day, thinking about how my heart is going to pump so much blood that my body is going to explode like a water balloon. I would lay in my bed and all of a sudden all the furniture in my room would “turn evil” and I would run away and hide in the bathroom. I would rock back and forth constantly, convinced that if I kept my body still for too long that I would die. I would think about three dimensional space and have a panic attack. I would sit in class thinking about colors. What even are colors? Where do they come from? Why do they exist? I would have another panic attack. It started impacting my performance in school so I got set up with a psychiatrist and they put me on buspirone, and it didn’t work. All it did was make me dumb and slow. The use of the word “stupid” in the lyrics “it’s ok to be stupid” are very intentional. Not to say at all that you’re stupid or “lesser” if you have to take a medication to function normally, but rather that was a reflection of my inner monologue at the time. I felt embarrassed and depressed that I had to take four or five pills a day to function when there are people who take zero.
On a more big picture note, as time went on my condition improved. I graduated high school, had cut out a really bad person from my life, and I stopped taking my medicine. I was fine and didn’t need it anymore. And I realized that they put me on drugs for anxiety that was entirely situational. And so the message of the song is that mental health is treated like a biological issue instead of something with an immense political utility. If someone is dealing with depression or anxiety, you go to a psychiatrist and they say it’s a “chemical imbalance” and they give you a pill to correct it. Which is fine and all, but what’s maybe intentionally left out of the conversation is why certain individuals have a chemical imbalance in the first place. Are they worried about having to choose between rent or food, or struggling with medical bills and student loans, or perhaps having to go to work as a line cook for 10 dollars an hour at the height of a deadly pandemic with very immunocompromised family members at home like I did? Your brain develops anxiety and depression for a reason. In a country like the United States where 2/3 of all adults suffer from some sort of mental illness like depression or anxiety, are we really buying the idea that everyone is just mentally ill for no reason? Or is it more likely that our material reality just sucks? There are people out there who really do just have a chemical imbalance and medicine is a godsend for them, but for the rest of us it is not the final solution to our problems. A healthy society that values mutual aid and human connection over the unstoppable extraction of profit and privatization of everything will do far more to treat mental illness than any amount of anxiolytics or SSRIs ever could.
Are you (Nolan DeBrincat) the only songwriter in the group, or do the other members contribute songs, too?
Yes, I am the sole songwriter. Every song was written and recorded by myself in my bedroom closet, my bandmates didn’t actually join until a month or two ago, they’re helping me prepare for live performances. It’s been really fun working with them and even more incredible hearing songs I wrote hunched over my PC alone at two in the morning being played in real life. It’s also quite humbling being around people who are way better with their instruments than I am. Needless to say though it’s also presented some new problems for me having no experience playing in a band before. When I make songs I don’t write anything down, I just hit record and move on; I’ve forgotten how a great deal of my songs even go. So an equally great deal of my effort lately has been spent on rewriting my songs and optimizing them for live performances, reverse engineering and recording various demo versions of each song to work off of during practices.
You have cited songwriting influences like Alicks and Soda Island. What other artists have influenced your songwriting?
I grew up with a very eclectic music taste. My dad was an emo who played My Chemical Romance in the kitchen while cooking dinner and drove us around playing Death Cab For Cutie, my mom sang in a Patsy Cline cover band and was active in our local community theater singing showtunes. Alicks/A L E X was the first artist I discovered on my own and was the artist that actually got me into recording music. For whatever reason in 8th grade I was obsessed with drone music and ambient music. I had a little one-track cassette recorder that I found at a thrift store and I would go outside recording little noises or instruments I had laying around and then Frankenstein them together in FL studio to make ambient drones. I played saxophone in my middle school jazz band as well so I was really into Herbie Hancock, Maynard Ferguson, John Coltrane. I’d cut out the drum tracks from different jazz tapes I had and use those for drums. I have maybe 8-10 albums worth of music from this era of my life which will (hopefully) never see the light of day. On a semi-related note, the Alicks/A L E X thing is super cool because he was by a long shot my favorite artist for so long in my adolescence and now I’m actually working with him on a few projects.
