When we uploaded Madvillain’s “Accordion” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” videos back in 2008, YouTube wasn’t capable of hosting HD videos, let alone 4k. To celebrate the two-decade anniversary of Madvillainy and our upcoming release of Madvillainy Demos and the Audiophile Edition – out November 29, 2024 – the original music video director Andrew Gura has remastered both the “Accordion” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” music videos from the original DV files.
Buy Vinyl: Madvillain – Madvillainy Demos
Buy Vinyl: Madvillain – Madvillainy Audiophile Edition
Director Andrew Gura on the Making of “Accordion” & “Rhinestone Cowboy”
It’s interesting to think that so many people’s only point of contact for Madvillainy has been these compressed, interlaced 240p videos on the Stones Throw YouTube channel – 14 million views on “Accordion” and 5 million on “Rhinestone Cowboy”. I’m just glad that we could remaster the videos in a way that does justice to our original vision.
As we cracked the code on remastering the videos, I started seeing more depth and feeling more connection with DOOM’s performance come through, and that’s a testament to Masanobu Takayanagi, the cinematographer who shot them with me. When I think about it, the videos were made in a way that aligns with how Madvillainy was made, with a lot of intuition and minimal equipment. The videos feel richer now – more evocative.
Being in Los Angeles, DOOM must have felt distanced enough from his life in Georgia to have an open mind about collaborating. Working on an album with Madlib, you’re in the trenches. Sure, DOOM & Madlib were staying in the same house, but they were in their own worlds, connecting when they had beats or rhymes to share.
Before “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Accordion”, Madvillain and Stones Throw had already produced an animated video for “All Caps”, which came out so well – respect to James Reitano. I remember asking Chris [Peanut Butter Wolf] about shooting a promo for Madvillainy and he told me that DOOM didn’t want to be on camera.
I met DOOM at the Stones Throw house and he was really kind and seemed eager to share – I told him about the lengths I had gone to buy KMD’s “Peachfuzz” 12” single and how much I loved his verse in “The Gas Face”.
Then a little later, Chris let me know that DOOM was down to shoot something with me. I met with DOOM and he talked me through the story he had in mind. It was analogous to some of the lyrical imagery in “Rhinestone Cowboy” – which is about the album being leaked.
The storyline in the loosest sense was DOOM is in the LES, making his way home late at night, and he decides that he needs to go into a bodega, so he stashes his mask in a dumpster. And someone else finds it.
What would this everyday guy do with these new powers that the mask gave him?
“Dogs, he got it like new powers, woke up, wrote, and spit the shit in a few hours”, right? So there’s synergy between “Rhinestone Cowboy”’s lyrics and the video, but maybe not in too direct a way.
The night before the shoot, I met with DOOM in Little Tokyo and he handed me his mask in a plastic bag. As a new director, I was so unsure of myself, but he was very trusting and hyped to be shooting a video together. We had a couple of pitchers of beer and I went home and felt the mask’s presence in my 1920s Silverlake apartment.
The next morning, our crew met up and went to work before dawn: actor Nathan Johnson, cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, producer Brett Henenberg, and production designer Caroline Foellmer.
We picked up DOOM around 8 in the morning and then ran around LA, all in the same car, trying to make the shots look as good as we could given what little we had – improvising based on when the sunlight would be at its best.
And as you watch the video, DOOM starts appearing more. He was like, “I could be in that shot. But I’m way off in the distance.”
There are some near misses between Nathan (the actor) and DOOM. And in the end, DOOM regains the mask, backlit by a gauzy Montecito Heights sunset.
We put an edit together and the story flowed but something was missing: DOOM.
And about a year later, he was open to performing on camera.
Werner Herzog said something like, “staring down the camera, is like looking death in the eyes,’ and having been on camera, I agree, but when it came time to shoot his performance setups, DOOM and I already had a creative shorthand, a common language.
And DOOM was already good at spitting on camera – watch “Gas Face” – he absolutely kills it.
So we were dare I say…friends? Collaborators? And he knew my whole crew. We picked up where we’d left off and homed in on his lyrical performance. There were seven or eight takes of the whole song (“Rhinestone Cowboy”), which is a lot. We couldn’t have done that on 16mm film. Every take, we tried a new idea or composition, sometimes focused on DOOM, other times with dancer Brittany Perry-Russell doing her thing.
For “Rhinestone Cowboy”, the story was shot in 2003, then the performance in 2004, and then in 2007, I finally did something with “Accordion”. It speaks to the extended timeline that characterizes the entire album from leak to re-recording to release to now – 20 years later – going Gold.
I knew that if the opportunity came back around, I wanted to shoot “Accordion”. It was the banger – it hits you in the gut and gets your head nodding.
The first music video I ever directed was by Daedalus, who Madlib sampled for the track, so I asked Alfred (Daedelus) if he was down to be in the video, and he was. That got DOOM into the idea too. Daedelus showed up to the shoot with his own DOOM mask. Somehow I didn’t get a photo of it.
This time around, we wanted something more minimal. With “Accordion”, so much of the lyrical imagery sounded – at least to me – like a dialogue between the waking self and the shadow self. There were a lot of dichotomies and contradictions. These binaries came through in the lyrics, and the idea that an Accordion moves in and out – so we wanted to use the Stones Throw office hallway as a stage with these two directions.
It was a space for DOOM to do his thing. He’s so alive, telling a story like only DOOM can.
You never know the importance of the moment you’re involved in until much later. It’s wild growing up a hip-hop kid and then making something that has become a document of an album that has influenced so many people.
Thanks to Stones Throw, MF DOOM, Madlib, and Peanut Butter Wolf for the opportunity.
