Foo Fighters Visit the Old "Neighborhood" in New Video
Today the band that will headline Voodoo on October 28 dropped the second video from its upcoming "Concrete and Gold" album.
Earlier this week, Foo Fighters made news in Tokyo when they played a Nirvana-like version of “Never Gonna Give You Up” with guest vocalist Rick Astley. Today, the band that will play the Voodoo Music and Art Experience in City Park on October 28 dropped the second video from its upcoming album, Concrete and Gold, due out September 15. The song, “The Sky is a Neighborhood,” echoes Aerosmith’s “Dream On” but with less ballad and more stomp.
The video features two girls--Grohl's daughters Violet and Harper--who find the night sky above them—as well as the band on their roof—magical, and Foo Fighters have launched a corresponding website to coincide with the video release. I have yet to be able to open the site on the coffee shop wi-fi I’m using, but according to the press release, “Go to https://sky.foofighters.com from your phone to configure a realistic constellation map in the viewer’s 3D sphere, then let it identify the constellations in your night sky—all while tiny Foo Fighters soundtrack your explorations at the bottom of the screen.”
“The Sky is a Neighborhood” follows “Run,” and the video for it earned Foo Fighters a nomination for an MTV Video Music Award.
When Foo Fighters played Voodoo in 2014, the band was hard to separate from its contexts. Dave Grohl managed to be simultaneously professorial and culturally touristic with his Sonic Highways album and HBO mini-series—neither great looks—and perhaps because of that, the band was hard to separate from its most aggressive fans and the bro privilege both seemed to enjoy in concert. Their show a month later at the House of Blues made it easier to focus on the band’s fundamental charms:
Foo Fighters are a classic rock band for post-indie, post-alternative rock times, with no patience for celebrity. Grohl’s black T-shirted average-guy persona is at odds with conventional rock stardom. Rather than see the microphone as a conduit for his grander thoughts, like U2’s Bono, or for the unchecked id of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Grohl excused himself from talking.
“The last thing you want is me talking after a couple of shots of Crown Royal,” he joked.
His everydude quality is crucial to the band’s appeal. The songs have an unpretentious meat-and-two-sides quality, and Grohl seems so down to earth onstage that fans can see themselves in him and imagine that if they fronted a heavy rock band, they’d be like him.
