It’s not always a good idea to put a musician behind the camera. Sometimes what shows up when a rock star directs his own video is nothing but ego driven slop.

But when Linkin Park’s DJ Joseph Hahn stepped behind the lens, the band ended up with a clip that had people scratching their heads. That’s what you get when you fly a whale through a desert.

“Any criticism I have ever gotten for that video, has always been, ‘What’s up with the whale, dude?'” co-director Nathan “Karma” Cox joked with MTV. He says the whole thing was Joseph’s idea.

“It’s more of an elemental thing” Joseph went on to explain. “Where when you think of a whale, you automatically associate it with water, but it’s a contrast to the environment, because there’s no water in the environment. So it was basically a way to visually connect the ground to the sky to the tower, where we were.”