Fast Friends – We Broke the World (Music Video)
The concept of “deepfake” is a little terrifying and kind of amusing – but mostly terrifying. Using just a photograph, anyone can come alive at the control of the creator.
Los Angeles alternative rock group Fast Friends have taken the technological trickery to a new level with their new music video for “We Broke the World”.
Written back in 2018, the new single is a crushing anthem about the crumbling state of the world: “We’ve all been making a mess for so goddamn long that we don’t even see the actual mess we’re making anymore. There’s got to be a breaking point, right? A peak oil moment. A Sting jumping around in tights moment. A Chris Paul and Blake Griffin’s whining is just getting to be too much moment.”
With a handful of famous faces joining in on the sing-along for the music video, the feisty chorus of “look what we’ve done / we fucked it up / we broke the world and now it’s out for blood” takes on a whole new meaning as the rich and infamous scream out the song’s lyrics.
Director Dexter Tortoriello explains the music video’s origins:
“At the beginning of this year, the top minds of computer science published an academic paper detailing a new model of generating “deepfake” videos using only a single photograph of the target. Anyone could be turned into a puppet, and people were terrified and amused. After they played me the track, it was stuck in my head for days. The song is really trashy and immediate and it felt like a really good idea to utilize this brand new bleeding edge tech to create something super dumb and immature. I barely even graduated fucking high school, but I’ve watched some coding videos on YouTube, and that turned out to be good enough. A few weeks later I’m stuck in quarantine summoning Ronald McDonald to scream bloody murder and nothing is real anymore. I ask myself if Guy Fieri would have actually been in the video if we paid him enough. I tell myself he probably would. I wonder what will happen when the bad guys get a hold of this tech. I wonder if maybe I’m actually the bad guy. Oprah appears on my desktop and reassures me that I am not.”
To help match the song’s pummelling lyrics, “We Broke the World” is a hard-hitting Weezer-esque power pop tune with the underlying punk stylings of FIDLAR bashing the message home.
Fast Friends will be releasing their debut EP HI T LO IQ on July 10th.
