“When listening to music, my ear always goes to the lyrics first,” they say. Speaking over the phone from their home in Southeast London, Tempest tells me about their love for music that is lyrically transformative. And with their latest album The Line Is A Curve becoming a UK Top 10 chart hit, the only way continues to be up. Born out of a squat party in Peckham, the band split in 2012 after just one album, but not before Tempest’s righteous and poetic rhymes made a mark on their hip hop peers, winning fans in the likes of Roots Manuva and Scroobius Pip.įast forward 10 years and Tempest has become a two-time Mercury Prize nominee, an award-winning poet (both published and performed), a novelist, a playwright and, with 2020’s On Connection, an essayist too – a remarkable run by anyone’s standards. At 18, they formed alternative hip hop trio Sound of Rum. Suddenly there was all this incredible music to dig through.”Īlongside working at the shop, Tempest would perform regularly at open mic nights from the age of 16 – notably at the Deal Real record store on Carnaby Street, once known as London’s hip hop Mecca. I discovered all these great rappers who had already put out so much work. “For me, it was like going from black and white to colour – life suddenly became so much richer. “I think that when you’re young, discovering music can be the most technicolour experience,” they say. Staff writer Grace Z.The shop specialised in hip hop, soul, reggae and dancehall, but Tempest explains the people they worked with were primarily into East Coast rap music, and that passion was passed on as they started to broaden their palate. Their relationship is over, but will their role in this ever-playing music video be? They look at each other, eyes heavy with meaning and regret.
At the end of “Closer,” the two characters walk outside and seem to still be on unhappy terms. So will Halsey and Taggart ever escape this timeless state? Will they ever find their way out of the music video? The answer is unclear. The grayness implies that because time cannot undergo its natural course with the couple, it must find a way to pervade somehow-hence the urgently gray tones in the video. And yet Halsey and Taggart remain as youthful as ever.
In this case, the gray envelops the video, suggesting that time should be passing. Gray can symbolize many things, including age, decay, and the passage of time. And they look as young as they did when they were still happy in love.Īppearances can say a lot, as evidenced by their youthfulness, and by the overwhelming gray tones in the video. Several years after the breakup, the two see each other at a party again in the video. The two are trapped in time, never aging. Why the intensity? Perhaps they really are not growing older. At 3:10, Halsey and Taggart start aggressively singing “We ain’t ever getting older,” over and over again, building in tension with every repetition. When can we escape from this dimly lit room?” would be a more detailed phrasing. “And I, I, I, I, I can't stop / No, I, I, I, I, I can't stop,” Halsey sings. This same desperation is brought to the surface with the lyrics. “Help us.” The desperation is thickly layered in the video. “When are we going to put on real clothes?” Taggart’s constant shirtlessness begs to ask. “We can’t stop singing,” Halsey’s disgruntled expression seems to say. And because these clips are constantly played through all four minutes and six seconds, it seems like the kissing and touching are endless. Your eyes are forced to concentrate on their faces, like how Halsey and Taggart may be forced to keep up this charade. The tight frames suggest confinement-there is no negative space. It all seems to be happening in the same room, which may come off as banal and repetitive. The majority of the video is close shots of Halsey and Taggart kissing, over and over again. This repetition-paired with the close shots, the repeating lyrics, and the grayish tones-suggests that Halsey and Taggart are trapped in time, never aging and forced to go through the motions of kissing, touching, and singing over and over again. The video is composed of clips from their time together and apart, tampering with the temporality of the video. “Closer” follows a tumultuous relationship between Halsey and Andrew Taggart. It’s definitely not the first song to lament over the end of a romantic relationship, and yet the Chainsmokers and Halsey’s “Closer” music video seems to bring something suspiciously sinister to a clichéd storyline.
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