News

Embedded above is the first music video ever produced for the legendary art rock band Sonic Youth, “Death Valley 69,” the eighth and final track on their 1985 album Bad Moon Rising. This is also the first music video that was co-directed by Richard Kern, one of the leading figures of the Cinema of Transgression movement. The song and the video are a perfect time capsule blend of audio and images from the raging punk scene coming out of NYC’s Lower East Side in the ’80s.

According to Jack Sargeant‘s definitive history of the Cinema of Transgression, Deathtripping, Judith Barry was originally hired to direct the video with Kern only hired to do the gore makeup special effects. However, Kern would end up co-directing along with Barry. (The video’s on-screen credits, listed in full below, also credit Sonic Youth as a co-director.)

The final video ends up being...

From the bowels of 1986 comes this regurgitated interview with two titans of the Cinema of Transgression, Cassandra Stark and Richard Kern. While the two are clearly posing trying to act as transgressive as possible — only Stark smiling for a brief second breaks the performance — this is actually an interesting interview as Kern details the production of one of the seminal films of the Transgression movement, Fingered, starring Lydia Lunch and Marty Nations. Plus, there are extremely brief clips of some of Kern’s films opening the interview. And things Kern discussing are absolutely Nsfw if the sound is up.

This interview is apparently from something called Sublapse Video Magazine, which, according to this bootleg video site ran for about 100 minutes and featured music and short films by Morbid Opera, Redd Kross, Richard Kern, Psycho Daisies, Nick Zedd, Half Japanese, Sonic Youth, White Flag and Casandra Stark. I’ve never heard of Sublapse,...