Pyramid Youth - Soyboy
Back in 2019, I wrote a song, originally entitled "Pseudo Soyboy Soliloquy", which gradually got worn down to just "Soyboy". It's a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek piece very much in the vein of Beck. It's about pretending to be a vegan as an opportunistic attempt to flirt with someone. It's somewhat ironic that, since I finished the song, I have been writing about the push for vegan/plant-based diets as part of a global corporate greenwash campaign. Maybe my next song will be more politically charged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy3cwIcGkww
The video, directed and edited with expertise by my friend and collaborator Nancy Berbank, is a "snapshot of the now forever lost 2019 [Canterbury] zeitgeist", in the words of Matthew Watkins, AKA Professor Appleblossom, who appears in the video as the lab-coated DJ intermittently holding a pineapple in front of his head. ((Matthew Watkins is a mathematician, writer, and musician, perhaps most (in)famous in the psychedelic scene for having taken Terence McKenna's "Timewave Zero" to pieces, a comprehensive debunking that McKenna later referred to as the "Watkins Objection". He's already appeared in a couple of music videos, including Deerhoof's "Dispossessor" and Humble Pious's "Squat".)) The house in which the video was shot was a stone's throw away from the corner of Mill Lane identified as the psychogeographical "omphalos" of Watkins's almost-uncategorizable book You Are Here.
Interestingly, the video was almost entirely ignored on Twitter (except for a few nice comments, including one from Right Said Fred!). Those who follow my work on Twitter generally know me as a writer dealing with quite dark, hard-hitting material about the corruption of the green movement, so maybe a video in which I'm prancing about a weird house-party in a Jimi Hendrix scarf singing "my baby's plant-based, ooh-ooh-ooh" just didn't really gel with that audience. Either that, or Twitter is just shadow-banning it because of the word "soyboy", which is an amusing scenario to consider.
Soyboy is available on Spotify and the like, but if you'd like to support me more directly, you can download it from Bandcamp.