Hey Stinkerino, Jake here shouting from LA. “Has anybody seen Del? Heads Swell.” Working on the new video… peas
Jacob Rosenberg, 5/16/2000



Heads Swell
An unprompted email in May 2000, alerting me that longtime Hiero associate and director Jacob Rosenberg was working on a new music video for Del the Funky Homosapien’s fourth album, Both Sides of the Brain, could not prepare me for the images attached to the message.
In it, Del’s lifelike bust, mouth agape, stared back at me with no explanation.
“What in the…” I thought to myself.
I wrote about it immediately on Hieroglyphics.com, making several subsequent posts to fill in the blanks, and followed up with a phone conversation and interview with Jacob to get the full picture, attempting to pry as many details of the video’s concept as possible.
That interview, originally posted on Hieroglyphics.com in May of 2000 as a streaming RealAudio file, is told below, making its appearance as an MP3, and liberated from its defunct audio format purgatory for the first time in nearly 25 years.
So, what exactly is up with that Del doll? Let’s find out…
If You Must
Listen to the original conversation, or read below:
Stinke: We’re here with Jacob Rosenberg, director extraordinaire.
Jacob Rosenberg: Yea.
Stinke: So, what’s the deal, man?
Jake: Today, [producer] Alex Tse and I were running around and scouting locations. We’re trying to find soundstages to shoot on.
Stinke: And this is for the [Del the Funky Homosapien] video, “If You Must…”
Jake: Which we’re shooting on May 27th [2000], here in Los Angeles.
Stinke: And what format are you shooting it in?
Jake: We’re shooting it in 35[mm]. It will definitely be the cleanest Hiero video that people have seen in quite a while.
Stinke: You guys gonna freak the widescreen again?
Jake: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The concept calls for that.
Stinke: Can I ask you a question on a technical level? Why not film in DV (Digital Vide0 format)?
Jake: Well, DV, to me, has a certain aesthetic quality that obviously denotes video. I don’t know if people saw, there was a movie called “The Celebration,” that a guy named Thomas Vinterberg did, and it wall all shot in natural lighting, on video, which was appropriate.
Stinke: “Video” as in DV, or VHS?
Jake: DV.
So to me, if the concept calls for video, then shoot it on video.
I saw the new Wyclef Jean video, I’m not gonna diss it, but aesthetically I didn’t care for it too much. Because, I felt like they were substituting film for video. And to me, there’s a much more intimate quality that video has. Like you feel like you’re really there.
Stinke: So, obviously, picking the format of 35mm, you have a finite vision.
Jake: Oh, absolutely.
Obviously, we don’t have a huge budget to work with, so we need to come up with a concept that fits the budget, and video would be very cheap.
Now, what can we pull off on video that really works intelligently, that MTV would play? Because that’s our goal, and people can criticize it as much as they want: “Oh, selling out… Blah, blah, blah…” But truth is, you want to get spins.
I mean, I got emails from kids these last couple of weeks. And they’re like, “What’s up with the new Del video? I’d never heard of Hiero until the ‘You Never Knew’ video.” And to me, that’s important, because that really means that people are peeping their music based on [exposure from the videos.] And he was like, “I turned on all the kids at my school to Del’s new album,” and that’s great.
A Changing Media Landscape
Stinke: Why do you think everyone fronted on the “At the Helm” video so hard, in regards to the stations and MTV?
Jake: I think “At the Helm” is sort of a more gritty, raw video. Obviously, that was again another low budget video that we did.
The ironic thing is that when we show that to producers and agents here in Hollywood, they like that more than “You Never Knew.” And to me, “At the Helm” is the kind of video that grows on you a little bit more. And I think, maybe, that’s because it has more of a narrative storyline.
But I think the reason they just fronted on it is, I mean…First of all, one of the things we’re going to struggle with, even with the new video, is that MTV doesn’t want to play stuff that is not hot right now. Del’s [“At the Helm”] video has been out for over a month.
By the time [Both Sides of the Brain] comes out, the video’s going to be out for over two months. Now, that’s difficult to push them into saying, “now you need to play this [new] song…” So, it’s very political now with all of the stations.
Even, like, the California Music Channel — for heads who listen to this, who are from the Bay, they know CMC. They’re on channel 26, they were like a real underground thing, they would always play Too $hort videos and everything…They play Brittany Spears videos now. You really have to make a mainstream video to get onto these stations now.
I don’t believe in selling out if you sit down with the artist and you agree on a concept that they feel. And Del really feels the concept that we have right now, and it very much caters toward that mainstream, but it’s not a mainstream video. We’re able to pull off things that appear “mainstream,” but the idea behind it, is it is not a complete snub of mainstream videos, but definitely saying that it is contrived.
Del the Doll
Stinke: One of the things that struck me about the pictures you sent me and that I posted up on the website was the quality of the model head you sent me, dude. Because for a low budget video…

Jake: Yea, it’s off the hook. The guy that I hooked up with—this guy taught me how to skateboard when I was like 5 years old. And he is a sick artist. Like an artist, like in the real meaning: he does computer graphics, he paints, he’ll do installation pieces, he does organic pieces. And ultimately, we want to collaborate and do some more videos from start to finish, like come up with a concept and art design it and everything.
I had talked about the doll; it was originally in the concept when I first came up with it. I mentioned it to him when I just hooked up with him again because I hadn’t seen him in years. And then he was living in L.A., and I was living in L.A., and it was like, “Yo, let’s hang out!”
And then we were kicking it, and I was like, “Hey, by the way,” I said, “Let me just throw this out to you. Let me tell you this concept of this video, and I don’t know if this is something you could do… But this is what we need.” He called me back a week later and said, “I’ve really been thinking about that, and I think I’m down for it.”
Originally in the concept, the doll was a little more comedic, a little more not really looking like Del. But now that it really looks like Del, that’s exciting as well.
Stinke: Are you going to make it explode? *laughs*
Jake: No…I don’t want to talk about the concept, because the people who listen to what we are saying now are going to be the people who get on the Hiero Hoopla [message board], and say shit.
Stinke: (One love to the Hoopla Heads, no disrespect.)
Jake: Right, right…I can say, the video is very much a performance video, that centers around mainstream qualities of videos today.
Stinke: Ah…
Jake: And let’s just say that Del is manipulated into making a mainstream video.
Stinke: Do you want to put auditions for half-naked women up on the website pretty soon?
Jake: *laughs*
We really don’t have the budget to hire, like, what’s that 2Pac song? “I seen that girl in Nate Dogg’s video.” The people in the video, you’ll have never seen before…But sure, whatever.
Literal vs. Conceptual
Stinke: Where do you think you’ll be filming at, location-wise?
Jake: Well, we don’t know. We saw three locations today that we’re scoping out. I have video footage of all of this stuff, so I’ll do a full feature when we’re done, with all behind-the-scenes stuff with the development. I was actually filming when Del and I sat down and hammered out the concept.
When we sat down, we went through everything to make sure, “are you cool with doing this?” Del and Domino are very happy with the concept.
The difficult thing is when you have a song like, “If You Must,” part of you wants to go literally.
Well, we have a limited budget. And if we want to really go literally, do we just go literally and shoot it on video? We might capture the song, but unfortunately, fools aren’t really going to peep that! That’s going to be something we put up on the Hiero website, and we’re like, “Here’s a literal version of ‘If You Must.'”
[Domino & Del] are definitely down with it. It’s definitely Del’s video.
The point is, to me, Del’s been around for a long time. People know who he is. We were just at the House of Blues show [in L.A.] and it wasn’t incredibly packed, but it was still a good-sized show. People still know his music. So, he’s still an artist to me that has some sort of recognition, and it’s just a matter of getting him recognizable again.
I think this should be a video where his image will be very much the emphasis of the video — his presence, and his performance. And the song when he raps, he’ll be performing the song as he does live, which he has gotten very literal in terms of hand gesturing and stuff like that.
Stinke: Cool, so you’ll continue hitting us off with flicks and shit?
Jake: Oh, absolutely. You know how I do it! I surprised you with that Del doll! I got that pic from my boy and I was like: “stinke @ hiero dot com…”
I was like, “I wonder how long it’s gonna take him to reply to this one!”
(*Stinke & Jacob go off on a tangent about a long-running inside joke involving secretly directing porn videos.*)
No Driggidy
Jake: I hope people feel the Del video. I’m sure people will be happy with it in terms of being a visually-pleasing video. It is a creative thing, it will have good art direction. It will be a good, well-rounded video. And some fools might hate because they’ll feel like, “oh this is a mainstream video.”
They can hate when they think it’s a mainstream video, and that means we’ve done what we wanted to do.
The point of the video is, that, hey look: This is a fucking independent guy, who makes independent records, who’s going to come out with this video that appears to be mainstream, but if you really peep the video, it’s about the fact that mainstream videos are very manufactured, and there’s a formula for it.
If it works out, and it ends up getting played in all the places, then we’ve played the cards exactly as we should. And that’s great, and I think people will feel it. The song is funny, and Del is charismatic.
As long as there’s no Del driggidy, we cool!
Stinke: Ohwwww! That could be a plus, though!
Jake: It depends if it’s the first shot of the day, or the last shot!
Stinke: What the hell is up with that [Del] head dude, that doll…What the fuck? That’s my big question.
Jake: I told you the concept a long time ago!
Stinke: I know you told me the concept, but I was not expecting that, dude! That bugged me out!
Jake: The doll will be articulate.
Stinke: Who did the doll, give him a shoutout.
Jake: Chris Cooper! He’s got a website. It should be blkprjct.com. He is just a really, really dope artist.
That is the original mold. So that’s the clay molding.
Stinke: And Del sat down and he had the whole thing —
Jake: No!
Stinke: No??
Jake: No, I took hella headshots of Del every time I saw him.
I was like, “OK, I need to take headshots of you,” and he was like, “Ahwwww.”
One time dude was driggidy, and it was all bad.
“If You Must” – Directed by Jacob Rosenberg
A few weeks later, on May 31st, 2000, Jacob sent me an update over email:
Stinke, What’s up! We shot the video. A 14 hour day Saturday and we transferred the film to video during a 5:00 AM telecine session this morning. All I’ll say is that it looks clean (crisp & clean), E-Swift got a quick cameo, and Del gave a strong performance for the video. Plenty more to come.
Jacob Rosenberg, 05/31/2000