Rich Aucoin recreates 20 iconic music videos for his “Walls” video

Sean Furtado

Halifax's Rich Aucoin is known for his creative music videos -- his video for 2012's “Brian Wilson is A.L.I.V.E.” won a Prism Prize, and his "It" video featured dozens of homages to his favorite films. For his latest, "Walls," he and director Jason Levangie recreated scenes from 20 classic videos, including Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Prince's "When Doves Cry," Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity," Beyonce's "Single Ladies," Radiohead's "Just," Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," Alanis Morissette's "Ironic," Run DMC & Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," and many more. Says Rich:

After some explicit videos cut from news footage, I thought it would be good to have a video that was lighter and so we came up with this video as a kind of sequel to my "It" video but instead of classic films, it's a cutting together of 20 of the most iconic music videos of all time from Beyonce to Weird Al! We had an amazing team and crew putting this all together and it's really fun to see the artists in the videos break down the walls in between their sets and join each others' videos and hop from screen to screen on a classic YouTube landscape.

The "Walls" video premieres in this post and you can watch it below.

"Walls" is the latest catchy single from Rich's politically minded new album, United States, which is out this week. As for the song itself, Rich says, "instead of the more overt lyrics of the previous singles 'How It Breaks' or 'Reset,' the lyrics of 'Walls' can be interpreted on a personal or community (national/glocal) level. Obviously, images like the american proposed border-wall come to mind but also the idea of closing ourselves off from one another too and, in both cases, the refrain's call is to tear down the walls that divide us."

You can preorder United States here and listen to a few more tracks below.