Joseph Kahn: The Outsider Who Built the Inside

35 Years of Music Videos

Interviewing Joseph Kahn

There's a moment about twenty minutes into our conversation with Joseph Kahn where he says something that reframes almost everything else he tells us: "I got to be the guy that now gets to shape it." He's talking about pop culture — the parties he never went to, the dancing he never learned, the girlfriends he never had time for as a kid who moved from Korea to Italy to the suburbs of Texas before he was ten. He didn't become part of the culture. He became the person who builds it for everyone else.

That's the throughline of a career that includes Eminem's "Without Me," Britney Spears' "Toxic," eight videos with Taylor Swift, Destiny's Child's "Say My Name," Wu-Tang Clan's "Gravel Pit," and — depending on which count you trust — somewhere between 170 and 500 music videos across 35 years. Wikipedia says 187. Kahn isn't sure that's even close. "I've done at least ten videos a year, at least," he tells us. "So I know I'm at least 350. Maybe. It depends." His first year alone, he made 26.

This is a preview of our full conversation — the podcast episode will be live soon. Here's what's inside.

The Rock Soul Underneath the Pop Gloss

We opened by asking about something Kahn has said in a previous interview: that there's a Ministry-style industrial engine running underneath his most polished pop videos, and he just puts the pop on top of it. He traces it back to arriving in America at seven years old, not speaking English, without friends, watching television to learn the culture instead.

"I actually didn't hear any rock and roll until I saw it as a music video on television," he says. His first was Joan Jett performing "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" — the black and white grain of it, the grit. "I remember thinking that was the craziest experience ever." From there: Michael Jackson's "Beat It," which he's quick to point out is secretly a rock song because of the Eddie Van Halen solo. Prince. Metallica and Ministry during his angry teenage years. High-tempo Public Enemy before rap slowed down into what he calls "mumble rap."

He tells a story about running into Max Martin — the Swedish producer behind half the pop canon of the last three decades — and discovering they'd both smuggled a rock soul into pop from opposite ends of the process. "What I do with visuals, he's done with actual music," Kahn says. "He has a rock soul that he puts into pop, and I have a rock soul that I put into pop too."

Blank Space Was Revenge

The best story in the entire interview is one we didn't expect: the direct line from Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs to "Blank Space" five years later.

Kahn was in the room. He watched it happen live and initially thought it was a bit — he tweeted that it was funny, that this would make her famous. Then he saw her face. "I was like, oh my god, this is real." And in that moment, watching a 19-year-old get humiliated on a stage in front of the entire industry, he made himself a promise. "I told myself, I'm going to help her get revenge one day."

It took a few years. When he finally got his shot with "Blank Space" in 2014, his entire creative thesis was built around inversion: take the thing pop culture had decided was uncool — "the entitled blond white girl that everyone thinks is not cool," as he puts it — and weaponize the exact stereotype until it becomes something to celebrate rather than dismiss. Swift wanted to make fun of the media narrative around her dating life. Kahn wanted to go further: give her the biggest castle, the most cars, turn the entitlement itself into the joke, and let the audience fall in love with the nightmare version of the archetype.

"Remember, at the end of the day, music videos are marketing," he says. "They're not just stories." It was a real risk — and it worked because, in his words, "people got the joke." He calls it his own favorite video in the catalog, unprompted, later in the conversation: "I generally put myself into that video. I genuinely love the Taylor Swift character." He mentions a scene in the video's midsection that Swift was unsure about — that she let him keep anyway, trusting a sequence she didn't fully understand yet. It became, in his estimation, the thing that powers the entire back half of the video.

The Accidental Invention of Vertical Video

Long before "vertical video" was a term anyone used, Kahn built one — and the story of how is a small masterclass in why some things get invented by accident. He describes noticing, early in his career, that his widescreen compositions weren't hitting the way he wanted them to on the television sets people actually owned. Movie theaters let your head move left and right. A TV in someone's living room does something else entirely — your eyes flick, but your head stays still. Different image, different physiology, different rules.

Studying directors who mastered the boxy 4:3 frame — he cites Marcus Nispel specifically — Kahn started asking a stranger question: what happens if you stop fighting the box and lean all the way into it? What if, instead of composing left to right, you composed up and down?

The result predates the term "vertical video" by so long that when I searched for who made the first one, his own work didn't come up — nobody had thought to categorize it that way yet. He built literal sets designed around vertical movement, drops, and reveals, composing along what he calls "the Y line" instead of the X line most directors were locked into.

He's also, notably, not an IMAX convert. He fell asleep during a recent big-format theatrical release, by his own admission — and his objection isn't that the wide image asks too much of the eye, it's that IMAX gives it nothing to do. For a director whose career is built on composing along the edges of the frame, IMAX is functionally a center-punched image no matter its size — the format doesn't actually let him play left or right, or up or down, the way a deliberately composed widescreen or vertical frame does. "I need that logical stimulation," he says. "I need that engagement with the cinema of your body reacting to it." A screen that's all scale and no compositional incident is, in his word, boring.

Five Days Without Sleep

Not every story is a grand theory. Some are just what actually happened on set. We asked about "Say My Name" — the strict, single-color rooms that turned Destiny's Child's video into one of the most imitated pieces of production design of its era. The answer we got instead was about sleep deprivation.

Kahn shot "Say My Name," "Thong Song," and at least one other video back to back to back, flying between locations, rained out, rescheduled, and re-shot — to the point where he genuinely isn't sure anymore which specifics belong to which shoot. "I literally didn't sleep for five days during that period," he says. "So I was out of my mind." The now-famous choreography wasn't planned in advance. He was inventing it in real time, on a microphone, shouting "bam!" and having the group freeze, then move, then freeze again — telling jokes on set between takes that he says would get him "kicked out of Hollywood" today.

"As much as I would say I was being precise," he tells us, "I was actually out of my mind on that video."

The GlamBot, and Who Gets Credit

In 2016, Kahn took a robotic motion-control camera arm built for car commercials and turned it into the rig now known across the entertainment industry as the GlamBot — the slow-motion, spinning red carpet shot that's become inescapable at every major awards show since. He designed the whole system from scratch: the lensing, the lighting, the choreography of where a director has to physically stand so the unstoppable moving arm doesn't hit someone in the face.

He mentioned his role in creating it on social media, quietly, well before it became a subject of public dispute. Nobody paid attention until, in his telling, someone else took credit for it in a moment that blew up online — at which point people who disliked that person suddenly started using Kahn's name as ammunition. "No one cared that I had invented it until that particular moment, conveniently," he says. He's matter-of-fact about the whole thing: this is simply how credit and ownership work in the industry. "You don't own anything that you do," he says. "If you give a look to somebody and they choose to use that look later, which a lot of artists do — you don't get, you don't bill them for it. You get paid for services."

He also points out, with some amusement, that the entire rig is now obsolete. Modern phones shoot high frame rate slow motion well enough that anyone can approximate the GlamBot effect with a smartphone on a stick. The tool that once required a custom-built, six-figure motion control system has been replaced by something that fits in a pocket.

What Thirty-Five Years Actually Taught Him

Late in the conversation, we asked Kahn to name his favorite videos in a catalog this large — a question he says he gets constantly and has learned to answer honestly rather than performatively. His answer is refreshingly unpretentious: he doesn't reach for some obscure deep cut to prove his own sophistication. He likes the big, global, popular ones — "Blank Space," "Toxic," the Backstreet Boys videos, the Janet Jackson videos — because those are the ones that actually connected with people. "If it's just an artist getting off to some little weird technique, you can screw off," he says, only half joking. "I like the things that people love. The bigger, the better."

He pushes back, gently, on the idea that pop music and pop videos are inherently shallow — the "soulless" label he says gets applied constantly by people who dismiss the genre before engaging with the craft inside it. His answer isn't really an argument. It's a description of his own process: "I never go into it thinking, I'm not going to make the best video ever. Every time I make one, I desperately am trying to make the best thing ever. I'm trying to surprise the world." Whether or not that's soulless, he says, is beside the point — because it isn't soulless to him, and that's the only thing that has ever actually mattered to the work.

His closing advice, for anyone making videos or trying to break into the craft, is almost disarmingly simple: love what you're doing, because that's the only sustainable reason to do it. Everything else — the money, the awards, the credit disputes — comes after, if it comes at all. "If you do it for any other particular reason," he says, "it's going to end badly for you."

This is a preview of our full conversation with Joseph Kahn. The complete episode — including his thoughts on generational shifts in editing rhythm, why he still worries about the safety of directors inheriting his GlamBot rig, and the massive video he just finished that the label won't let him release yet — is live now wherever you get your podcasts.

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