Micah Buzan is a self-taught animator and musician from Kansas City, Missouri. In 2013, he won the Genero.tv music video contest for The Flaming Lips. The time consuming and complex process for creating this psychedelic animation for The Flaming Lips’ song “Look…the Sun is Rising”, took over 2,000 hand drawn pictures to make up his video.
Micah has just recently released the single, “Be Happy”. This song will be on Part 2 of “The Tyranny Of Thoughts” project, which is Micah’s follow-up to the 2013 release, “The Tyranny Of Thoughts (Part 1)”.
I sort of held off liking Micah Buzan at arms-length initially, thinking he was kid who seemed a bit smarter than he was and wrote some fairly intellectual pop songs by accident. I now understand him to be a modern purveyor of sound, not just shapes and forms. Micah is irreverent yet serious, fun but focused; psychedelic and electro poppy, but tough and experimental.
It is clear that Micah is pretty much left field in his approach to music, so you’re not about to hear any of his songs on FM radio real soon, not that it bothers him much anyway. Micah is a creator, so limits and boundaries end where his imagination begins. “Be Happy” is chirpy and upbeat with some of the most ferociously dark lyrics, I have heard over a musical production of this nature. Try to ‘be happy’ after reading these lyrics:
“He drills holes in his skull
to let the demons out
locked in a room
chained to a bed
searching in earnest for an exit”
Once you hear the music, you’ll notice how the contrast between music and lyrics in some places, is absolutely brilliant, and Micah’s vocal tone which moves between playful and menacing, only adds fuel to the conflicting fire. As music lovers, we should expect the genre to evolve over time, where good, creative artists don’t simply rehash music that’s worked before. To that end, we probably should have expected an artist like Micah Buzan to crank out a song like “Be Happy”. The thing is we’re never really ready, due to all the radio crap that keeps pumping us with how successful pop formulas should be made.
So if you’re tired of the mainstream crowd, Micah Buzan has taken his style much further into something that touches on a blend of psychedelic, retro-bubblegum and futuristic-electronica. In between, the lyrics are dead serious, and the “Be Happy” theme, in a world sold on consumerism, is a very actual one indeed. An artist with vision and imagination – Micah Buzan is one to watch closely!
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