Flying Lotus' Tiny Tortures

   Tiny Tortures by Flying Lotus is an incredible instrumental hip-hop song. Flying Lotus, because of his type of music is typically unheard of, but he's great. He's been doing the music for the black screen's with white text in between breaks on Adult Swim for years, proof that he is talented, just not well known. He has a few LP's that he has released, but Until the Quiet Comes is the containing Tiny Tortures. As great as the song is, the music video is incredible.
   Elijah Wood plays the role of a young adult who has recently lost his arm. Considering that it's an instrumental hip-hop
song, no lyrics are available to describe any bit of what's going on, but the instruments do it with ease when accompanied by great production design and a grim color palette. The video opens with a shot of the night sky followed by sports trophies and a Dreamcast gaming system with a greyed television. That right there tells the viewer that it's late and Elijah's not doing much of anything. Loads of pills are then seen, telling the viewer that Elijah is indeed on drugs. The audience then sees him lying hopelessly in bed just downing pills, in hopes of a better future. Soon after, things get weird. On account of the drugs, Elijah has formed another arm from various materials in his cluttered bedroom, he's obviously extremely drugged. Things stay completely dark in every sense until the effects of the drugs worsen. He's then surrounded by an abundance of colors, the typical out of body experience. Amongst these colors of red (anger), blue (sadness), and green (life in it's unfairness), a new human arm is formed and a baseball bat is gripped. He walks around a little longer until he comes back to himself while lying in bed. Upon coming back, he looks down at his now broken robotic arm and nervously smiles, for he knows he can have his arm back, but only while drugged.
   Without a true sense of production design or a nice color palette, who knows what could have been seen. It’s simple things such as those that have such a great impact on the story.