Upcoming nobody - a clarion call to creatives

BTS of the Upcoming Nobody music video, shot by Vriety and featuring nexa

Article written by Kirstin Brookes

Images courtesy of nexa

nexa, the artistic polyglot, is spurring us on to enact our kidlike creativity and submerse ourselves in the inspiration of community with their latest music video release, Upcoming Nobody with 500.

The video, which was released to YouTube on 7 August, is the titular track from their debut album composed of nine languorous tunes. The album is preceded by a significant body of work which includes two EPs, Picnic and Ugli Day. The former 5FM Radio music compiler is also a lifelong visual artist, and it is in the Upcoming Nobody video that we see them celebrate ‘art for art’s sake’, which has become an act of rebellion for them against the overthought experimentalism that can eclipse an artist’s creative gutfeel. 

At the start of the video, we hear before we see. The sensuous, lo-fi hip hop-style beat begins and the song title and its performers’ names are superimposed over the black screen. It is a daydreamy doodle of a font – star-dotted i’s and n’s in Tippex white, like something you would see scrawled on the inside of a teenager’s workbook. 

Then we join nexa in the most intimate of spaces for any artist: their studio. It is an expansive space in the literal and the figurative sense – industrial and scattered with paintings and art supplies, with tall, wall to wall windows that let light spread through to every corner and crevice in the room.  They sit before a centrally framed blank canvas, which we gaze up at with them. The low angle shot creates a sense of promise and devotion to the medium, and nexa’s head-tilting contemplation tells us that they have no concrete plan for the piece, and that they are content in this unknowing of what will materialise. 

The lyrics begin and nexa mixes colours on their palette: 

Cinematic, kinda tragic how you

Complain ‘bout the bad shit

And how your dreams haven’t happened

These lyrics speak to nexa’s journey over the past year which they shared with us in an interview earlier this month. They are cautionary, as if nexa were speaking to a past version of themself, before they redirected their energy away from the corporate world and increasingly toward making music and art full time.  

The message in the lyrics resound in the video as well. The scene beckoned me to answer to the creative impulses that lie dormant inside of me, to write this article instinctively rather than engage in my usual neurotic planning for days in advance. To do so felt revolutionary – like I’d heeded nexa’s call to liberation, to trusting myself. 

The video also reads as a love letter to the connections in nexa’s artistic circle. Until the first chorus they are straight-faced and solitary, painting with a calm, focused presence conveyed through close-up shots and nexa’s soft, honeyed voice. Then they are joined by a horde of friends and co-creatives, and there is a palpable energetic shift toward joy found in the context of community. As I watched their various friends come into frame and stare admiringly at their work with them, I was heart-struck by the simple, symbiotic joy of sharing one’s soulful creations with a likeminded human being. It also reminded me of an aspiration of nexa’s that they shared in the aforementioned interview – that they wish to be a well of creative inspiration for others to draw from. 

Beyond art being for art’s sake, i.e., for the expressive release of the artist, it is also for the sake of the potential to move people in a meaningful way through the pure happenstance of creative honesty. And it is in the way that they naturally move their audience that nexa stands as a musician to follow. The Upcoming Nobody music video landed as an endearing call to feel deeply, lean on others, and intuitively and unabashedly bare my soul with my voice and my hands – to inspire, and be inspired by.