It would be the last music video put out before his death and for Johnny Cash this video to Hurt, summed up a career rather perfectly. Rick Rubin had taken on the task of bringing back Cash’s music to new generation, his days in the country music field seemingly forgotten by the pop direction of the genre in the late nineties.
Rubin, worked magic with the simple voice of the long time icon of country music, with four recording under his belt for Rubin’s American Recordings, the single from The Man Comes Around would cross all barriers from country to rock.
A re-interpretation of Trent Reznor’s signature tune for Nine Inch Nails, Cash took the song as if his own story, the emotion drains out with each strum of the guitar. The video impact of the touchstones of the career of Cash nicely interspersed with the lyrical content. The pictures or Cash with his wife June Carter are touching, the scenes of his closed up House of Cash sad. Each new shot offers a new glimpse of what once was and of a defiant man not willing to just fade away as he was expected to do.
Reznor himself would look at the video upon its completion and stand in awe of how his song was given a life of its own, that even he couldn’t have ever imagined possible, at times referring to it as a song that was no longer his.
This is how a video should look; it compliments the song like few others can do. It is assembled with little flash, just the music and the man. The lyrics jump out from the screen, “What have I become my sweetest friend, everyone I know goes away in the end” Lyrics originally to tell the harrowing story of heroin addiction, found new purpose when in the hands and voice of the master story teller of Nashville.
From the opening shots of Cash strumming his guitar in what appears to be his study, to the closing frame of him closing up the piano, symbolic as it turned out as his days on earth would soon come to an end after this testimonial to his life.
Rick Rubin has worked with many of rock’s major talents, but in the end none of them can compare to the man in black, he was a one of a kind. Rubin, like few every have, captured and understood that spirit perfectly.
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