Posted by Benjamin Ahr Harrison

And so we come to the conclusion of our journey through five of my all-time favorite music videos. And we’re going out with a bang! Just a warning, this video is a little more extreme than your average MTV vid, and it’s also a little more than 8 minutes long, so be prudent about when/where you watch!

Dead Prez is one of the best crews in hip-hop right now, and they’re acutely aware of the discomfort they cause with broadcasters. Instead of dumbing themselves down to get radio spins and MTV plays, they stay true to their extreme political message. This video will never show on television, but in a way, they’ve shown up every gangsta rapper out there by doing the video no other gangsta had the guts to do because of the financial lure of making top-100-friendly music.

This video is important to me because it represents what can happen with a video if the restraints of TV censors aren’t there to be concerned about. The extreme scenarios and matter-of-fact depictions of crime that evoke the same emotions we get when we’re watching a Tarantino film. This is what almost everyone in hip-hop is talking about doing, but Dead Prez, with director Gil Green, go and describes detailed plots and schemes and then shows themselves doing them in their video!

This video is epic in scope. It has at least four capers, a looong intro sequence, a long cut scene in the middle, and a short end with one of the most hilarious buttons in music video history. They’re dealing with big issues in the video, and they take their time doing it.

Posted by Benjamin Ahr Harrison

Mobb Deep’s Prodigy is one of the fathers of the gangsta tradition, and after Mobb Deep’s incredibly wack first album on 50 Cent’s G-Unit label, Prodigy struck out on his own to make some of the kind of music that made him famous. He put out the solo album, “Return of the Mac” with this as its lead single.

This video is incredible to me. A big part of what’s so fun about Prodigy and the whole persona of the pre-blinged out gangsta rapper is that he’s supposed to be kind of terrifying. This video is shot like a horror film. It depicts Prodigy doing drugs, brandishing weapons, taking gulps of booze, and ultimately, going completely and violently insane. The deranged mood of the video perfectly compliments the song. Prodigy doesn’t come off as someone you’d want to meet in a dark alley or even in broad daylight, and I think that probably helped sell a lot of albums. I definitely copped one.

Posted by Benjamin Ahr Harrison

Welcome back to Music Video Week! Today’s entry represents the state of the art a little bit more than the last couple. Music videos aren’t as well-funded as they used to be, but people are still innovating and trying to make them interesting. Rik Cordero is one of the current generation’s master practitioners, and this is my favorite video of his.

What’s great about this video is that it takes a pretty hazy little plotline surrounding a hilarious prop—the USB thumbdrive afro pick—and doesn’t tell a story per-se, but lets the musician’s swagger really come out. I wouldn’t want to work in an office, but if I did, I’d want it to be the one where ?uesto has a drumkit set up in the back hallway. In short, what Cordero is great at is getting fantastic performances. That’s not as easy as you might think. Very few resources went into this video. There are no flashy visual effects. There are no choreographed backup dancers. Just confidence in the performers. With The Roots and Rik Cordero, we the audience are in good hands.

Posted by Benjamin Ahr Harrison

Here’s the second in my weeklong series of some of my favorite music videos. This one really blows me away. The technique being used here, if you’re not a film person, is stop motion, meaning the rapper sat there and moved his face and body incrementally for each frame while the filmmakers animated everything around him.

Not all artists need a video as crazy as this, and many artists would justifiably balk at submitting to working on a music video for a week—I don’t know what the production schedule of this was like, but I can only imagine it took a very long time. Artists generally can’t get behind videos like this, but when they do, amazing things can happen.

The video isn’t without its faults. The downstairs neighbor stealing the golden microphone storyline that gets introduced toward the end is dumb and feels like they were stretching for ideas. But at this point the video has already delivered so big that there isn’t much that could take it down.

Posted by Benjamin Ahr Harrison

What’s up, Double 7 World? Allow me to introduce myself: I’m one of the Double 7 Spotlight Filmmakers, and I’m new to posting on this blog, so I thought I’d start with a bang. Every day this week I’ll be posting a music video I consider to be exceptional, followed by some thoughts on what’s great about it. Today, a classic vid, and it’s hard for me to believe it’s already a decade old!

What’s dope? Well first of all Lauryn Hill is at the peak of her powers right here. One of the dopest tracks from one of the dopest records of all time. The concept for the video is a complication of Lauryn’s contemporary sound and the old school foundation that she built that sound on, as well as cultural trends and awareness that span the history of the musical tradition she’s working in. It’s a complication, but it’s not complicated, and it’s a natural concept to visually explore the themes of the song.

The cinematography is gorgeous. The muted colors and high contrast look aren’t flashy, but they fit the mood of the song perfectly. The split screen is perfect and seamless, and is generally achieved with mise en scene, rather than compositing two shots together. When there are composited shots, they blend perfectly and remind the viewer of the duality taking place in the rest of the video because there’s a Lauryn Hill doing the raps and another doing the backup vocals on screen at the same time. This is a very self-confident video. It’s dope.