Sterling Larose turned Snotty Nose Rez Kids into the Beatles and he might win a Juno for it

Sterling Larose's entry into the music industry is, in some ways, what you'd expect. He was a kid running around with a video camera, who got into film school, started working on set, dropped out of film school, started making low-budget videos for independent artists, and then prospered. But the Vancouver-based music video director's path to success also took a brief detour down the Slurpee aisle.

Larose is nominated for two best music video Junos this year: one for the Snotty Nose Rez Kids video Damn Right — for which he's already won the 2023 Prism Prize — and another for feral canadian scaredy cat by Young Friend, which he co-directed with longtime friend Zachary Vague. 

Back when he first started making music videos, however, he wasn't actually making any money from it, so he financed his career by taking on more lucrative work: making commercials for 7-Eleven. 

"I went to the 7-Eleven yearly conference, which they held at the Pacific Coliseum [in Vancouver]," he says. "It was the weirdest thing ever. It's all the vendors, like Bic lighters and vape companies and all the things that are at 7-Eleven."

Larose says he loves working in music videos because, unlike when you're selling convenience store taquitos, "they're a pretty open playground creatively." He has been working with Snotty Nose Rez Kids "about three years and 10 videos now," and considers the group his close friends at this point. 

Initially, the group wanted to do "a sci-fi futuristic treatment."

"They realized it was going to be about triple the budget they wanted to spend," he says. "So I was like, 'OK, this is really cool, but let's shelve this.'"

While they were batting around ideas, the group's manager mentioned a line in the song in which they refer to themselves as "the Native Beatles," and said it might be cool if they recreated the Sgt. Pepper's album cover somewhere in the video. Larose grabbed that idea and built the whole video around it.

"I grew up with the Beatles," he says. "I'm a massive Beatles fan. I was like, 'I'm so stupid. Why didn't I think of this originally? Why don't we just expand that and do the entire 10 years of the Beatles condensed?'"

He adds that re-imagining the biggest rock and roll group of all time as a Haisla rap duo feels significant.

"They're Indigenous, it's hip-hop," he says. "If you do [a Beatles parody] with any other band, it's just a parody. In this context, it's still mostly a very fun video, but it adds an extra something."

He got involved in the Young Friend video after going to a Kendrick Lamar show with Vague, who was working as Young Friend's creative director. The pair had worked on their first few music videos together before going in separate directions professionally, while remaining friends.

"We were out for bubble tea after the show," Larose says, "just bouncing ideas off each other. And [Vague] was like, 'Well, do you wanna just come and co-direct it?'" 

The video's budget was tiny, meaning that the duo had to get creative.

"We had, like, no money to do it," he says. "It was like a $5,000 budget. But we had a lot of resources and favours we could pull, so we [worked] with that in mind. Shot it in, like, two days."

Larose says that in order to make a good video, you have to like the song. That may sound obvious, but sometimes directors try to talk themselves into working on songs they don't love.

"If you try to pretend and say, 'Oh, it's not mixed yet' ... or 'I like the artist, it's a cool concept,' you're never going to be happy with it."

It's the sort of latitude in picking projects he could have only dreamt of back when he was working for 7-Eleven

"They made some monstrosities," he says. "That breakfast pizza — that should have never existed. They were really pushing that when I was working there."