The Postal Service - Such Great Heights

JAN 21 2003 · 12:00

The Postal Service - Such Great Heights (2003) Director: Josh Melnick & Xander Charity (working as Josh & Xander) Era: Indie Electropop Emergence (2003) - Peak of early-2000s indietronica crossover; Sub Pop's second platinum-era breakout coinciding with the rise of blog-era indie culture and long-tail internet music distribution. An essential artifact of the early-2000s indie electropop moment, this video's clean conceptual execution, romantic longing staged inside an antiseptic microchip factory, distills the era's tension between digital-technological modernity and deeply human emotion. Its quantitative profile (fast-cut 2.25s avg shot length, muted-warm palette, high contrast) mirrors the precision of the electronic production it accompanies. The Apple/Intel controversy adds a significant layer of cultural-legal history. Tier 1 archival priority. Context: Released January 21, 2003 on Sub Pop Records, 'Such Great Heights' was the lead single from The Postal Service's debut album 'Give Up', a long-distance collaboration between Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello conducted literally via postal mail. The video's cleanroom setting visualized the song's themes of technological mediation and romantic longing with remarkable conceptual elegance. The song became a defining artifact of early blog-era indie culture, charting on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Sales chart and eventually going gold. Its cultural footprint included the trailer for the 2004 film 'Garden State,' multiple TV licensing placements, and a UPS advertising campaign, ironic given the band's name. Sub Pop offered a free download that had been accessed over nine million times by August 2005. Director notes: Set in the clean room of a semiconductor fabrication plant, the video depicts two workers in full cleanroom bunny suits exchanging longing glances while surrounded by automated chip-assembly machinery. The video premiered April 2003 and was produced by Britton Rizzio. It won RESfest and received an MVPA nomination. The video became the subject of notable controversy in January 2006 when Apple and Intel aired a commercial by the same directing duo that was described by The Postal Service as a 'shot-for-shot recreation' of the video's visual language; the band stated they did not approve the commercialization. The video was released as part of the official Sub Pop single package for 'Such Great Heights.'