There’s that running joke on Twitter when the passage of time seems out of sync. When bad things start to happen time can seem cruel, moving both fast and slow depending on your perspective. On January 27, 2020 the front page of USA Today read “Kobe Bryant, daughter killed in crash” and off to the side the headline read “Rush is on to develop vaccine for Coronavirus”. Now we’re living in a post COVID world, adapting, and figuring it out one day at a time with uncertainty about when we can get back to normal and imagining what that new normal will be.Â
“Limbo, the song itself, is about not knowing what in the world to do with the circumstances you find yourself in and how you can be stuck, when initially your trajectory was right on target.” says Keon Masters.
Filmed last summer by Persona La Ave, the video shows Masters wandering around Charleston, alone, usually smiling, waving and interacting with the man behind the camera. While they’ve been sitting on the video for a little while, now seemed like the perfect time to share it with the world with a lot of us feeling that our lives are in limbo. We’re in a time where a few more digital distractions can help us get through each day.Â
“Dylan, or Persona La Ave, is always creating.” says Masters. “He’s a true artist of the 21st century, whether it’s music, videos, photography, graphic design, fashion, sample making. He really does it all. It’s a real treat to watch him work and have him be involved with many artists across the area. In many ways, this is just as much his as it is mine. He reached out wanting to go run around the city and just film, so we did.”
For Persona La Ave, the video is much about happy accidents. One crisp summer day they hopped on a bus and took it as far south downtown as it goes. From there they walked back north up the peninsula shooting Masters with his 1998 JVC VHS camcorder along the way.Â
Dawkins said “I wanted to start every shot with a wide angle then have a slow – medium zoom into a heavy closeup , a trick I’ve seen in some music videos before and I just love it. It’s fun to shoot close up on people without them knowing it, I feel like if you told them how close the shot is they would get embarrassed and stop being themselves. Throughout the video, Keon keeps waving at the camera and running towards it, like he just noticed an old friend across the street and is in a hurry to say hey to him and greet them. In a way it makes the camera operator and the viewer a character in this story. Like “oh here comes my homie on this nice perfect day.”
The lighting is Charleston at it’s finest, on one of those warm summer evenings. Each glitch is organic, a secret trick that Persona La Ave does in the digitizing phase, another part of the happy accidents in the video.Â
I guess it’s also fitting that Masters premiere the video here on SceneSC, a website/organization that is also somewhat in limbo. Typically this time of year we’re putting out our annual sampler, we’re at SXSW, we’re at Savannah Stopover, gearing up for Indie Grits and looking forward to spring festivals like High Water and St. Patrick’s Day. For a year now, I’ve tried to figure out the next move. What South Carolina music needs, where it’s currently excelling, and what we can do to help. We’re not gone or going away, we’ve been doing this for 12 years so it’s more of a long breather as we find our way out of limbo.Â
I also must note that I cut Keon Masters from the 2019 sampler. I have a feeling he wouldn’t accept my apology if I offered one. In hindsight I didn’t understand his new project. Coming out of Brave Baby, I knew he was writing, and recording, but I didn’t grasp the fact that he had written South Carolina’s best indie pop record of 2019. So now I’m the fool and I’m fine with that.Â
Be safe out there.
