If you watched the Grammys this year, you might have noticed a musical curiosity that took place outside the broadcast proper: Karen O and N.A.S.A. (the hip-hop duo, not the space guys) covering Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” as lounge-y disco. Appearing in a Sonos ad, the cover threw in a lot: a little of the spacey experiments of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Mosquito, a little of the unabashed synthpop of the YYYs last album It’s Blitz, more than a little of the stylistic rapacity of N.A.S.A.’s The Spirit of Apollo (which featured Karen O, as well as about a quarter of the musical class of 2009), and a lot of this year’s love for neo-disco, the slicker the better.
“It’s always risky covering a classic, but the idea of completely re-contextualizing the song into a different genre sounded exciting to me,” Sam Spiegel of N.A.S.A. tells TIME. “One of my favorite collaborators and inspirations is Karen O, and she was the first person I reached out to.”
Animator San Charoenchai, who Spiegel met while working on his side project Maximum Hedrum, illustrated and directed the lyric video for the clip, and it’s as high-concept as the track – a soylent western, the frontier according to ‘70s futurism: a world of neon wanted posters, and bandits getting down to disco balls. Watch the premiere above.
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