My thinking behind “King of the Lake,” a goofy music video about serious things

“King of the Lake” started when I stopped in for coffee at Colectivo on Clark Street in Andersonville. Wavves’ “King of the Beach” came on the speakers and I had an insight. I had already been making music for a project called Fund Renewable Energy, and surf rock suddenly seemed like an obvious direction: loud guitars, beaches, heat, sun, and a very particular idea of summer. It also contained an interesting contradiction for a project about climate change.

Fund Renewable Energy was built around using fundraising and crowdsourcing to directly fund renewable energy projects. “King of the Lake” tested music, visual media, and digital monetization as another way to pursue that goal. Could a political idea become a song and video, reach people as culture, and generate money for the thing it was advocating for? The format was intentionally accessible and inexpensive. Climate change changes ordinary life—summers become too hot, parties become miserable, pools get too warm, and something associated with pleasure starts becoming threatening.

I recorded the first rough vocal for “King of the Lake” into my phone and began working with Suno to add backing instrumentals and autotune, editing, and experimenting from there. The idea expanded into Summer Forever, an intentionally uncomplicated surf-rock album about burgers, swimming pools, hot guys, parties, solar energy, heat waves, and being too hot to think. The songs are self-aware about their simplicity. An endless summer is usually a fantasy; under climate change, it starts to sound more like a threat.

The video followed the same logic. It was made at the Chicago lakefront with a phone camera, a blanket, a hat, sunglasses, and a speaker. While making it, I kept returning to a Kendall Jenner Instagram caption: “Excuse me if I’m a visual artist.” It became a joke about the legitimacy of AI-assisted music, but also a useful way of thinking about the project. The music was one material inside a larger work. The objective was not to reproduce every step of traditional music production. It was to have an idea and find the simplest way to execute it.

That is what interests me most about “King of the Lake.” ChatGPT could help develop lyrics and concepts. A voice memo could become source material for a song. Suno could help produce the music. A phone could shoot the video, and a computer could finish it. The project is about climate change, but it is also an art object about the growing accessibility of art-making itself. When the tools for creating and distributing culture become available to almost anyone, they also become tools for political communication. “King of the Lake” is a small experiment in what can happen when the idea becomes more important than access to the traditional means of producing it.