One Good Thing: Ren Gill, Hi Ren

A preposterously audacious and unconventional approach to songwriting and music videomaking

This is truly one of the strangest things I’ve seen in years, and though almost none of it is precisely the style of music I typically listen to, it has an incredibly fierce originality. Obviously there’s a lot of Eminem in what Ren Gill is doing, both in terms of the densely packed lyrics and in the use of a dramatic dialogue as a song structure. But I’m thoroughly “meh” about Eminem’s entire body of work, so that in itself would not merit a second listen from me.

The thing I find way more interesting is Gill’s shift, at some point in the song, to narration from what seems to be the perspective of a deity or a devil and then, at the end of the video, Gill speaking directly to the camera with a a style that feels like a lost work of Rimbaud or Baudelaire. It’s just so different, so completely unlike any music video I’ve ever seen. In a way, it reminds me of listening to Neutral Milk Hotel for the first time and feeling like Jeff Mangum recognized vast, unoccupied lyrical fields that he could run through, miles and miles of territory where almost nobody thought songs could even exist. Gill is doing the same thing, just completely going off in a new direction. I have no idea what “genre” he ended up in, and it seems like it would be an extremely difficult feat to repeat, but I really don’t care.