Japanese Breakfast, aka Michelle Zauner, shared a video for a new song titled “Savage Good Boy.” It’s the third single from her upcoming album Jubilee, following “Be Sweet” and “Posing in Bondage.” The full record is due on June 4 via Dead Oceans.
On “Savage Good Boy,” Zauner sings from the perspective of a billionaire who convinces a woman to live with him inside a bunker during a disaster. “I want to make the money until there’s no more to be made/And we will be so wealthy I’m absolved from questioning/That all my bad behavior was just a necessary strain/They’re the stakes in a race to win.” Musically, it’s a cute indie pop song with a steady rhythm section, cinematic keys and piano chords and a brief but climactic guitar solo to close it.
The Sopranos actor Michael Imperioli plays the part of the billionaire in the music video as he and Zauner eat small rations of food, get upset over cards and pose about in Louis XIV-era fashion. It ends with Zauner biting into Imperioli’s neck vampire-style, which reveals that it’s a prequel to the video for “Posing in Bondage,” which shows Zauner covered in blood at a near-empty grocery store.
It’s not Imperioli’s first music video. He has also appeared in videos for Cro-Mags’ “Between Wars” and Holy Ghost!’s “Heaven Knows What.” Imperioli has also had a part in ongoing television series Lucifer and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).
“‘Savage Good Boy’ came from a headline I read about billionaires buying bunkers,” Zauner explained. “I was interested in examining that specific type of villainy, and I found myself adopting the perspective of a rich man coaxing a young woman to come live with him underground, attempting to rationalize his almost impossible share of greed and miserliness. I knew I wanted the music video to be a pretty literal interpretation of that idea. I wanted to juxtapose images of this post-apocalyptic, industrial bunker with the lightness and extravagance of rococo fashion and set design. Aiming for that balance, my cinematographer, Adam Kolodny, and I were really inspired by Chan Wook Park’s The Handmaiden, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Sally Potter’s Orlando.”
Japanese Breakfast plans to tour behind Jubilee this Fall, including two nights at The Regent Theatre in Los Angeles on October 2-3. She will also be headlining Treefort Music Fest in Boise, ID this September.
Photo credit: Kalyn Oyer
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