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MNDR’s ‘Feed Me Diamonds’ Pays Homage in Drag to Marina Abramovíc

MNDR Feed Me Diamonds Video Drag

Sometimes SPIN fashion correspondent and occasional political essayist MNDR released a great record this year — “a really ill techno record,” to be precise — and its titular track is at last getting the video treatment it deserves. “Feed Me Diamonds” is everything that Rihanna’s “Diamonds” is not: a smart melding of pop and electronic production, empathy-inducing in its somber balladry, sung well, about death. It’s a very layered and very dramatic song, as Amanda Warner herself told us over the summer, and thus requires a complex and poignant visual storyline to go with it. In the new clip, which premiered over at Perez, we witness a day in the life of a drag queen’s transformation from svelte adonis to curvy goddess as he prepares to perform “Feed Me Diamonds” to an intimate club. What could seem like glitzy subject matter is in fact quite dark.

Here’s MNDR’s explanation of the song’s inspiration:

It’s an homage to Marina Abramovíc … she’s really important to me, and a really important artist. I was going through a really tough time, a really dark time personally. I was really broke and hungry, and I had dysentery. Everything was the worst I could expect or experience. She claimed that her father, who was an important political figure in Yugoslavia, was assassinated by being fed diamonds. I read about it more and that was a way to overthrow tyrannical kings, to make it look like natural causes, because when you eat diamonds, your digestive system will shred and you bleed out. This album isn’t a happy go lucky pop record and it captures a lot of emotional moments in my life. Politically and emotionally, this one really brought it all together.