El Guincho – Bombay
2010 · Directed by Nicolás Méndez
28K Likes
Best comments
1.“I'm high right now, and when the music started up I nearly shit myself.”
More comments
- 2.“There's so much happening. I can't absorb all this information.”
- 3.“This might be the best music video of the century. Seriously. Why aren't these dudes massive right now?!”
The story
El Guincho is Pablo Díaz-Reixa, a producer from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands who calls his style space-age exotica: samples, tropicália, Afrobeat and dub all spinning in one blender. Bombay was the single from his 2010 album Pop Negro, and the video went a lot further out than the song.
The Spanish crew CANADA made it, with Nicolás Méndez directing, and it doubles as the trailer for a Bombay film Méndez planned as his own take on the whole album. It opens with an invitation to tour the cosmos, El Guincho cast as Carl Sagan, and then forgets all about space. What follows is a '70s exploitation-movie fever dream: painted bodies, sparklers, girls with machine guns, wrestling masks, a satanic ritual, some foot-sucking and a contraption that fires golden cassette tapes into the sky. Very much not safe for work. CANADA's Lope Serrano later described it as a sexy update of the pictures Carl Sagan sent into space on the Voyager probe in 1977.
Rockdelux named Bombay the best song of 2010 and its clip the best video, and the song landed on the FIFA 12 soundtrack. CANADA struck gold with it. Díaz-Reixa went on to produce Rosalía's El Mal Querer by himself, and the album won Latin Grammy Album of the Year and a Grammy. The guy in the Carl Sagan getup knew where he was headed.
