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In Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis<\/em>, the main character is jolted out of his privileged life and given a glimpse of the underbelly of the city, its workers struggling to survive while the bourgeois eat on plates of gold. New York-based experimental pop artist\/female producer Dani DiCiaccio, aka KYOSi, takes the pleas of the proletariat and sets them against a steady dance beat: a modern protest in action that permeates her latest three-song EP, Negative Space<\/em><\/a>. In the video for her single “Boo Radley,” KYOSi reimagines the mysterious Harper Lee character in To Kill A Mockingbird<\/em> as a a modern day everyman, a mere “cog in the machine.”<\/p>\n

“To me this is ALL about class and the juxtaposition of the haves and have-nots,” DiCiaccio said of the song. “I wrote the track after a long rehearsal in Soho, where I was two floors underground in a raw artist space. It\u2019s one of the wildest and most hidden places I\u2019d ever been in NYC, yet we were beneath a luxury building. As I walked around thinking about what it might be like to live there I got to thinking that the only reason those people want to be in a luxury building in that location is because artists and thinkers have done the hard work to make it desirable.”<\/p>\n

The video utilizes archival footage from the industrial and worker\u2019s revolution, its black and white moving pictures set within the faces of dancers Shareef Keyes and Frankie DiCiaccio. It’s a clear message that not much has changed since Harper Lee’s time, as the everyman continues to suffer under the boot of the 1%.<\/p>\n

Watch Audiofemme’s exclusive premiere of “Boo Radley” and read our interview with KYOSi below.<\/p>\n