“War Money”

Music Video by Kent Sheely

ARTIST’S STATTEMENT

“The first time I heard ‘War Money,’ I could already feel a creeping anxiety running throughout, frantically escalating until it finally looped back on itself, the reprising melody familiar but more dire by the end. I already had the recurring image of a runaway train in my head, and as I thought about the structure of the Military Industrial Complex thanks to the song’s title, I started to imagine that endless loop as a little model railroad. Congress, the Department of Defense, and weapons contractors became stations along the tracks, with the train itself representing the cyclical exchange of funds and implements of destruction between them. 

“With this central metaphor of transport infrastructure in place, the absurd imagery of military hardware being harvested, shipped off, and stocked on civilian store shelves began to fall into place. A series of conversations with Dan about his thought process in composing the music informed the rest of the script, which takes some jarringly grim turns alongside the tonal changes in the song and brings the strange fictional world crashing into the horrifying reality of our own. By the end, there is a complete picture of both the mechanical structure of war and its human cost.

“From the initial design process, I wanted to utilize the video game aesthetic and critical undertones found in much of my other work, including intentional digital artifacts like graphical glitches, impossible geometry, and low-quality or missing textures. War and weapons have become inseparable from electronic entertainment, not only in the premises of some of the most popular games of all time but also in the fact that the U.S. military has been directly using the format as a propaganda and recruitment tool for more than 20 years. A lot of my visual choices were meant to subtly reflect that relationship while also communicating the overarching theme that this system is inherently broken and unstable. 

“I’m incredibly pleased with the way this collaborative effort turned out, and I hope it serves as a reminder of the hidden industry of warfare that never stops churning.”

–Kent Sheely