Who's Doing It Like Jungle?
Exploring how the British band Jungle effortlessly and flawlessly intersect the junction between art, music and fashion.
The Movements:
📸 Instagram
🎧 My Mixes
⏯ More Mixes
🎹 Music Production
🔊 Bookings & Partnerships
A Brief Intro
This is by no means a sponsored article by Jungle in any way. I just felt it necessary to speak about my influences and what I appreciate in the music / art world and there’s just to many things to speak on with this group so I wanted to write about it…
‘Casio… the watches?’
Around summer 2018, I was walking to the train station listening to some music and I got a message through from someone who linked me a video on YouTube. I didn’t look at it immediately as I had to run to the station to catch my train. Once I sat down on the train and opened the link, I wasn’t prepared for the euphoria I’d experience watching the video.
As you might be able to tell from the image above, that video was Jungle’s ‘Casio’, a video that had such a profound impact on me visually, creatively and aesthetically even to this day, I can’t think of anything that has captured me so intensely. From the song production, the fashion and inch perfect stellar choreography I was hooked. I then made it my mission to show this video and preach about Jungle wherever and to whoever I could!
At a time where a lot of music videos where very similar, short, quickly digestible and sometimes not even an option, I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to see a band making incredibly choreographed and stylised music videos where the focus WASN’T on one artist or vocalist / rapper.
You typically would never see the producers (Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland) unless they made a short cameo - similar to how Stan Lee did in Marvel films. This as a result creates some mystery and lore, a whole world in which the music inhabits and doesn’t become one thing or one person, rather a completely separate universe with its own narrative, characters and language.
The Design
Personally coming form a design background, I’m instantly attracted to anything visual and I often pay close attention to typography, colour and photography in every aspect of life. It’s hard to switch off sometimes!
One thing I noticed with Jungle was the consistent attention to detail when it came to how they presented themselves. Take the the art direction of their album covers for instance, they’re all different but look the same and sit together nicely as a family. The colour palette is refined and their logo is the root of the design, creating a powerful brand image.
Continuing on from this, Jungle used the same visual language in their tour merchandise - in particular, their tour posters and flyers which are exquisitely designed taking into account the visual language, colour palettes and typography they’ve used for their album artwork.
This creates a familiarity with the listener / viewer. A powerful brand identity without users even realising or it being obvious. This even extends into the tour t-shirts and hoodies to create a complete brand experience.
You may be asking ‘Why does this matter Raph?’ Creating a complete brand experience was subconsciously something I wanted to achieve with the way the ‘Raphael’ brand logo is perceived around the world. I designed the logo many years back and made very little (if any) changes to it to keep the brand continuity. This is something I admire a lot about Jungle and how they have presented themselves from a design perspective.
The Dance
I don’t think I’ve ever been as mesmerised by a dance routine in my life. Period. I couldn’t stop watching that ‘Casio’ video for a long time. I still go back to it today for visual inspiration. Then I discovered their other videos ‘Let’s Go Back, Heavy California, House in LA…’, which was like discovering a hidden treasure.
Aside from the ridiculous fact that it was a ONE-take shot, the dancers, fashion and choreography is truly captivating. This is large part of the editing of the video too which is sublime. Their videos have also birthed some of my favourite YouTube comments of all time below…
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