Cityreal & Wes Mackey hit the oil sands for "Nightlife" video

Vancouver rapper Cityreal (who was featured in the Straight's Local Motion column a few weeks ago) recent took a trip to Fort McMurray, Alberta, to complete shooting on a video for the track "Nightlife", which also features local bluesman Wes Mackey.

The video also includes aerial footage of the oil sands shot by filmmaker Peter Mettler for the Greenpeace-produced documentary Petropolis. (You can read Martin Dunphy's review of Petropolis here.)

Along with the video, Cityreal released a statement noting that “‘Nightlife’ is a track about how our bad habits can negatively affect our lives in the long term. In the past year, I was very much drawn into the controversy over the proposal of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would be an environmental nightmare in my home province of BC. This proposal would see massive oil tankers and destructive pipelines pass through BC from the Alberta Oil Sands. The idea that Canada is allowing, and in fact encouraging the rapid development of such a harmful energy resource, at such a risk, was something I wanted to address through this video.”