Most of the time, music videos can feel rushed, like a half-assed grab at creating more content/buzz around an artist or single. Some of the time, a music video turns out to be something more; a magnificent short film that can both hold all our short attention spans while visualizing an artists’ themes. Goodbye Tomorrow’s latest does exactly that.
Goodbye Tomorrow, an anonymous group who recently released their debut album A Journey Through The Mind Of A Non Believer via Rostrum Records, have outdone themselves with a powerful new video for “The Way,” premiered via Noisey.
The video takes you through some sort of post-apocalyptic, black and white version of Chicago overrun by terminators who destroyed “the way it was in the beginning.” In the beginning, the world is a cheerfully pixelated pastiche of 80s video-games until the drones seek out the remaining survivors.
Through the video, beautiful aerial shots of Chicago and crazy visual effects are spliced with the original song as the chase winds through the city. The survivors eventually succeed in bringing color, or “humanity,” to the city by planting flowers or turning the page of a comic book. It fits perfectly with the message of the song, which partly touches upon how hard it can be to engage in social activism in a world, blatantly dystopian or not, that emphasizes material wealth and excess. “I been rappin’ too much nigga my head hurt/ Fixin’ everybody problems only make my own worse,” are the first few bars of the song, before the same verse ends with an ironically pointed statement at the music industry model as a whole; “Lookin’ at promoters all crazy like why don’t you pay me?/ I heard to make it, gotta sell your soul to Hades, yeah I sold it/ Then I stole it back, nigga.”
Goodbye Tomorrow provided this cryptic quote to Noisey about the video:
“Døn͢’t givë̠̠ in͓ tø dü̠̠ality⃔. ₸he wo͛
ld i$ not sø b⃕la¢k and white͙. peÅce №t ¢om͓prømis⃒e… The concept of the video is the fucking truth…like, that’s the truth, that’s how the world actually is. It’s actually evil motherfuckers that are machine ass niggas that take you and program you. That’s the real truth, every day that shit happens. They wanna tame motherfuckers and put niggas into a box because if we’re pre-programmed to be a certain way then it’s easier to control what we’ll think and what we do. Until you see that, there’s no way to stop it, no outside help, it only come from you. That’s what you can take away from the video, song, album, all that. It’s just about the battle for your true self. You can’t never let somebody tell you who you are, what you are, what you can or can’t do, none of that. All the external, worldly, temporary shit is just a trick to get you off the way and shit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “
