Flying Lotus is on his game right now. With anticipation for his October album, You’re Dead!, building via word of features by Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, and Snoop Dogg — not to mention the insane Shintaro Kago-illustrated trailer that dropped yesterday — the Los Angeles electronica guru pulls our attention again today, this time to his animated rapper alter ego Captain Murphy.
With help from his friends and collaborators at Adult Swim, we get an origin story committed to melting your mind. It opens in the wasteland of Val Verde, Los Angeles (the Valley town where the man born Steven Ellison grew up), with a young FlyLo obsessively doodling images of Captain Murphy.
“I don’t know where he came from, he just sort of popped in my brain one day and I just couldn’t stop drawing pictures of him,” he says. His friends catch wind and start tossing around origin story ideas for the super hero (or villain) until the truth is, more or less, revealed. The clip looks to be first in a series and (no spoilers) regardless of what we figure out about Murphy, he delivers a powerful message at the end:
“Despite the things you think you know, the most important thing is the captain’s back.”
We already knew that, of course, as Murphy’s slated to appear on You’re Dead!