Duran Duran is sending the USA a message with a confronting new video for their 1988 song ‘The Edge of America’.
‘The Edge of America’ was a track from the 1988 Big Thing album.
The new video by Columbian-Venezuelan artist David Medina deals with immigration policy.
According to Duran Duran the video deals with “the impossibility of purity and the necessity of movement as important forces both in nature, as well as, the human condition. Using flocks of birds and those that have crashed with buildings and aircrafts among photographs of immigrants on Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, the video sets out to convey the encounter between the universal impulse to move and the artificial boundaries that we create to stop it. Different faces, recombined in mutating compositions, show our diverse ethnic origins and the impossibility of purity or even a unique racial identity: Two concepts that are critical around immigration policies all over the world”.
“I instantly realized that this was the right piece of music for David to work on and, at the same time, I was confounded that it felt more prescient now than it did when we recorded it,” says Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran.
Rhodes talked about Medina. “I was struck by his unique vision depicting a clash between nature and culture,” he said. “Although we had radically different backgrounds and life experiences, somehow we were both inspired by the idea of collaborating, so I started to think about a specific Duran Duran track that might lend itself to a collection of unexpected visuals created through algorithms… The video David has created is a gaze at humanity which expresses compassion & empathy, that is so sadly lacking in much of our world at this time.”
The release of the video marks the 30th anniversary of the release of ‘Big Thing’. ‘Big Thing’ was the fifth studio album for Duran Duran.
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