Knox Hill - Drive Thru (Music Video Initial Thoughts)

Compared to just the song, this is on one hand more literal than what I got out of the song on it's on, on the other hand this is more a storytelling video than the song on it's own...

There's a literal drive-through fast food place called McLabel and they use the business in the front (the fast food place) as a front for their drug sales. A poor young man gets a "golden ticket" and gets in the business and dies in the end. His meat is then grinded to make more hamburgers.

Ok, maybe "storytelling" is the wrong word, it's more like symbolism.

McLabel is a big record label, they pretend to just produce music but it's such a fucking huge company with execs with too much power in their hands and they lose their sense of humanity and I wouldn't be surprised if they slipped into doing something illegal through the company as well. They become blind to what is morally justifiable, because they have so much power in their hands and so much money that they get away with everything.

Same concept in a smaller scale: There are teenagers in the US (and probably elsewhere as well) with parents so rich that the teens don't consider parking tickets a crime, they consider them the cost of parking in said place. Most of the rules for parking are for safety reasons, like so you don't block an entrance to a building. What if someone needs an ambulance there while you're parked and they can't get to the person, because your car is in front of the door? You're endangering others. But you're so out of touch with reality you don't get it.

I wouldn't be surprised if big labels did run drug rings. Think about it. Think about how many artists signed to big labels have drug problems. Despite some of them being so big they can't walk out in public without being recognized. They're not out on the streets buying the drugs, but yet they're getting them from somewhere. So either the labels are providing them with the drugs or they're allowing drug dealers to deal to their artists. And it'd make sense. If we consider artists only as a commodity for a moment and put morality aside, it's more lucrative to have them work at their full power for a short amount of time on drugs, and when they crash and burn or people don't care about them anymore, switch them to the next one. Drugs not only "help" the artist to stay happy & energetic when needed and relax & sleep when needed, but because they're addictive and the label is the contact between the artist and the dealer, this keeps the artist reliant on the label.

I know this is a bit of a tin foil hat moment, but there must be some truth in it, right?

I think this same concept is presented in the video as well, with the young impressionable artist being lured in, taken advantage of and when he passes and can't work anymore, they just find a new one.

And use whatever they can get off the old artist (scrapped songs, unused recordings, any ideas they had) to figuratively feed the next artist and the industry in general.

There's a slight double to how fast food (especially in the US) is like a drug, because it's so full of sugar and stuff. Knox has another song about that topic as well, called Food Fight.

The golden ticket the artist gets in his burger is a reference to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where said Willy Wonka sacrifices children to use them as candy filling. And then the artist made into meat used in food is a reference to Sweeney Todd, where barber Sweeney and his accomplice, a baker, use human meat in the pies she sells.