Mark Nakhla ’13, ASL music video superstar, released a beautiful new video to Coldplay’s “Charlie Brown” yesterday.
It is the latest addition to his growing repertoire of artistically-composed videos. You may remember his interpretations of Drake’s “Headlines” and Jay-Z and Kanye’s “No Church in the Wild,” both of which went viral and have over 20,000 and 40,000 plays respectively. His “No Church in the Wild” video was featured on the Huffington Post, which also covered the criticism it drew from other members of the ASL community. The new video clearly pushes in a different direction, most visibly featuring Nakhla in a solo performance.
Nakhla notes how the criticism surrounding his previous video influenced his newest one on YouTube:
In many ways I made this video with a back-to-basics approach. After a lot of the negative feedback came out from the last video, I really didn’t want to make another video for a while. I took the suggestions that were constructive and used them to help me improve. This is what came out of that experience, and it’s a video I’m pretty damn proud of.
He also commented that his last video received hateful commentary from more conservative deaf people who thought he was “offending them by ‘misrepresenting’ their language.” Rather, he remarks that he was using “sign language as an expressive tool… that’s how [he] went into interpreting the song.” His newest video channels his dedication to continually improving his videos: “People will always tell you what you can or can’t do, but I didn’t let that get to me and just used it for fuel.”