PanicRoom 10: Jamie-James Medina

Jamie-James Medina isn’t your average creative. Born in London and raised in Bangladesh, he now splits his time between the UK capital and New York City working as a photographer, filmmaker and the head of innovation at XL Recordings.

Medina also runs a small production company, The Tourist, as well as his own independent record label Hot Charity. Working with artists such as Adel Radiohead, The White Stripes, The XX and SBTRKT as part of the creative team at XL, Medina worked on the promo for the latter’s NEW DORP. NEW YORK. video with PostPanic Amsterdam.

Recently he returned to the Dutch city to give a presentation about his work and inspirations and below touches on collaborating with the young talent at XL, the internet’s effect on his career so far and moments in time that have inspired him.

I want to start by showing you a clip that just makes me really happy...

I love that clip so much. The guy with the parachute is all people remember of that fight; it’s now become legendary. And one of the reasons I love it is because I think it’s a perfect example of pure chaos. I really love chaos. But what was really great about this moment is that it wasn’t for a cause, it wasn’t sponsored by a brand; GoPro or Red Bull didn’t set this up. It was just someone who had an idea and managed to pull it off. He climbed up to the top of the Mirage Hotel and flew directly into the ring during a 12-round fight and I love that.

Creative culture

I was born in London and grew up in Dhaka in Bangladesh. I now split my time between London and New York and exist as a full time creative. But my mother will tell you I’m a photographer and I say that when I go through customs. I believe that I’m a photographer. Photography allows me to capture moments and feelings like this.

One of the things I think about when I work with young artists is that life is pretty unbearable for a lot of the time. We’re all going to die; all your friends are going to die and no one can describe why we’re here. But creativity allows us to suspend all that disbelief and anything becomes possible in that moment. I think there’s real opportunity for us to create things in that chaos.

I’m going to show you another clip that makes me very happy…

I love that moment, too. The fans just went for it and the band, The Fear, did too. So many components of weirdness came together to make that great moment of television. I want to show you how we appropriated it at XL…

About three years ago I was in LA outside the Supreme store and I saw this kid. He’s a young musician called Tyler the Creator who was skating by me and there was just something about the way this kid held himself that was very, very special to me. I asked him if I could photograph him and he asked if I was a paedophile. I said no.

I was in LA with M.I.A at the time, one of our other artists, and I asked him if he and his friends wanted to come to see her and he said that they’d never been to a concert before. So we ended up getting about 20 kids into the event.

Tyler the Creator ended up becoming an artist and signing to XL but before he signed to our record label, just through the internet we managed to get him a spot on late night television and I want to show you some of that performance…

I think that moment when Tyler jumps on Jimmy Fallon’s back is so special in terms of him just seeing a moment and seizing it and it was the beginning of a campaign that helped us really start to see the needle move.

We’re finding as a label that music videos aren’t really selling records, I don’t even think those TV performances are selling records; we just don’t see the needle moving. But when you take a moment like that and you really push it and dive in, that’s when the magic starts to happen and that’s what connects with people.

When people ask me about XL and the new music we’re developing, they ask me who’s going to be famous and what youth movement they should be claiming next. My friend has a theory that when you turn 30 you’re not allowed to wear band t-shirts anymore. I kind of agree with it in some way, I’m 31. But as a label we want to be as current as possible, as connected as possible and as forward-thinking as possible for today’s youth.

Digital domination

The truth is, I’m here to tell you that I don’t know if there’s another youth movement left. I think that there’s only the internet. That’s where youth movement and kids exist. They love the internet and that’s where it is. Before, you had punks, rockers, goths and ravers and you were part of a tribe, forced to innovate within the confines of your chosen culture.

If you were successful you’d reach beyond the scene and ultimately you’d sell out. But kids don’t care about that anymore; they don’t care about selling out. There are no genres, there’s no black, no white, no gay, no straight. There’s just no division, which is ultimately a good thing. But it just means that there is no new. Kids just aren’t engaging or creating; they’re just reposting content and that’s affecting art. One of my jobs with our younger artists is to unlearn those habits and it’s extremely hard.

But that’s not to say that young people aren’t doing incredibly exciting things. Working with our new artists is one of the most exciting parts of my job, and it’s not that I don’t take their ideas and build them into my own works as a photographer and filmmaker, I definitely do that.

I want to show you another video by a young artist called Spooky Black, which I think is a good example of where content is headed. Every record label is trying to sign him…

So that’s Spooky Black, from Minnesota. He writes and produces his own music, he made that video himself and it is all working, it’s online now and has millions of views. He’s getting a record deal so where do we come in as a label? What can we do that’s better than that?

The internet is also destroying our attention spans. We don’t retain information because we no longer need to. I don’t need to remember something because I know it’s on the internet when I need to know it. And I think that takes it even further in terms of us not having opinions, in the way that some people will only like something if it has lots of views on YouTube. You see this with A&R teams and in advertising, too.

Time tracking

But Spooky Black is great and he’s going to continue to be great. And there are still underground movements going on…

I was in South Africa shooting an ad for Red Bull and was learning about the new dance music scenes there, which is incredibly exciting and one of the stories I was covering in my photography work was that I’d heard about this thing called Train Surfing where kids surf trains.

They hang onto the outside, climb up and once they are on top of the trains they try to surf them for as long as possible. For me, that’s similar to the Fear performance above and Tyler the Creator moment on Jimmy Fallon.

It’s creative and how we create moments for ourselves that stay with us. It all comes together in one package and isn’t a certain set of things that I can show everyone but it’s inspiring to me.

Read more highlights from PanicRoom 10 with illustrator Matt Blease on puns and pictures and look out for the third and final installment from RSA director Johnny Hardstaff later this week.