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Current Video Reviews

Lil' Wayne - “Fireman”

Lil' Flip & Mannie Fresh - “What It Do”

Ludacris & Field Mob - “Georgia”

Beyoncé, Slim Thug, & Bun B - “Check On It”

Bun B - “Draped Up (H-Town All-Stars remix)”

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Now CEO of suddenly-depleted Cash Money Records, you might expect Lil Wayne to extend his label’s bling-studded iconography in his latest clips. But strangely, Weezy has never been too keen on pro forma flossing: the “Go DJ” video was shot in the same horrible-looking abandoned penitentiary used in Shawshank Redemption. Now, this wasn’t jailhouse verisimilitude a la C-Murder: he loaded the prison with nightstick-wielding video girls, and walked around (and out) with his crew like he had the run of the place. We can party anywhere, he seemed to be saying; lock us up and the shindig moves in with us. “Fireman”, the lead clip from Tha Carter II, finds Weezy coping with a different kind of incarceration – here, he’s in college, strutting around his co-ed dorm, lecturing to his film class, and setting the mood with his girl by lighting a pyramid of candles with his outstretched palm. Lil Wayne is actually in college, enrolled in sports management classes at the University of Houston. But the ivy-covered halls aren’t the indelible image from this video; instead, the dominant shot is a hellish, bonfire-scarred vacant lot and a long, wide cement factory shell. A shirtless Weezy addresses the camera surrounded by post-industrial urban decay, flames licking the air around him. What is the most prominent hip-hop export from New Orleans – not to mention the head honcho of its biggest homegrown label – trying to tell us? Surely his own urban area is wrecked: wards he’d rapped about are now the subject of a federal debate over whether or not their salvation and reconstruction is economically feasible. When Lil Wayne shows those fires in the street to his classmates, is he trying to establish his gritty authenticity? Or is he quietly boasting of his ability to escape the devastation and relocate his ass to the safety of the university? Is New Orleans, to Wayne, a prison he can simply walk out of? Is he showing us, once again, that the locks, walls, and flames that pen in ordinary humans do not apply to him?. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-295343-videos--Lil-Wayne

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Then again, Weezy is simply confronting the same new visual reality that all rappers are grappling with – how do you floss in a city underwater? That Houston, Atlanta, and Memphis were not submerged is really immaterial: for months, the images we all saw from the Dirty South were, for the first time, literally dirty. Before 2005, if the only exposure to the Third Coast you’d ever gotten was through rap videos, you’d be forgiven if you’d thought that Southerners spent all day riding around in tricked-out Cadillacs, fondling their gaudy jewelry. Representing your hood was easy when it was all purely theoretical. Lil Flip is a Houstonian – he was DJ Screw’s final discovery before the tide of sizzurp carried him out to sea once and for all – and heretofore committed to canned iconography. But like everybody else in the post-Katrina South, Flip has caught a conscience. Moreover, he’s resourceful. He’s moved the party somewhere the waves can’t touch – in his private jet, skipping between the clouds. And when a New Orleans emcee calls him to complain that his city looks a mess, he turns the plane around and performs a little rescue effort of his own. So the “What It Do” clip commences with the first combination airlift/rap party in Crescent City history. After that, it’s all party; cars, video girls, watches from Jacob, Mannie Fresh on the mic, and the requisite police brutality shot. But that first exchange throws its shadow over the rest of the video, and gives a distinct resonance to the fantasy. On August 29, everybody in the Dirty Dirty was an escapist, and for damn good reason. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-283332-videos--Lil-Flip

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No seawall rings Atlanta, and Peachtree Creek does not require levees. The Motown of the South has been represented, in recent years, as a playa paradise: all parties all the time, glitz, baroque fashions, the gleam of princess cuts. Insofar as the phantasmagoria is a fraud, Ludacris has been a prime perpetrator – in his most recent clip, he extended the dominion of Atlanta’s favorite tropes to the far corners of the earth, flossing like a pimp on the African savannah. But times have changed. The Houston emcees have brought back a different kind of boastful video – one in which the emcee shows off his seedy-yet-vibrant inner city neighborhood in all its conflicted glory.  Paul Wall’s amazing, confrontational video for “They Don’t Know” is about the best of these, but as the need to represent a truer South in the wake of the hurricanes spread, the style has caught on elsewhere. “Diamonds On My Neck” is essentially a playa’s clip (it’s definitely a playa’s anthem), but Hype Williams devotes the first third of the spot to footage of Miami’s grungy-chic Little Haiti. Ludacris, never slow to pick up on a trend, enlists the militantly uncool Field Mob to presents us with the grimiest shots of Atlanta that we’ve seen in a long time. The video is jammed with huge crowds of decidedly non-jiggy individuals, staring back defensively as the camera sweeps through their blocks. Where most playa clips use a stationary or dollied lens, ridiculously bright lighting, and fixed sets, “Georgia” seems shadowed, buzzed, shot on handheld, and intentionally rushed. Literalizing the phrase “Georgia is burning”, the outline of the state is traced in gigantic jets of flame. Lest you think they’ve gone completely Roots on you, there’s an ass dancer shaking it inside the ring of fire. -Tris McCall.

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-302741-videos--Ludacris

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Like many of the post-Katrina videos of the New New South (or, depending on how you look at it, the New Old South), “Georgia” acknowledges and attempts to claim some of the more unsavory elements of Dixie history. When Shawn J raps about picking cotton and Confederate flags, it’s unclear whether his sense of irony has overwhelmed his pride, or if it’s the other way around. Now, Beyoncé Knowles is nominally a Texan – she was born in H-Town – but she no matter how much she assures us of her love for Southside boys in “Soldier” belongs to the rootless strata of international celebrity. “Check On It” is the lead single not from a Third Coast indie label or from a new Dirty Dirty release, but for a Hollywood movie starring Steve Martin, in a role made famous by Peter Sellers. It’s hard to get any further from country grammar than that. Still, Knowles makes a stab at street credibility by hauling in two of Houston’s most notable sizzurp-sippers: Slim Thug, still best known for his opening shot on “Still Tippin’”, and the Underground King himself, Bun B.  Isolated against pink backgrounds and stripped of the hood-rich accoutrements they’ve become associated with, the pair look a bit like caged lions; Slim Thug, in particular, seems uncomfortable as hell with the movie-star treatment, squeezing off a few lines with an expression hovering between embarrassment and deer-in-high beams shock. Knowles, of course, comes off great as usual, throwing the camera those angled glances and breathless come-ons that she has by now perfected. Too bad she’s such a crummy hostess. Regardless of what it says on her birth certificate, if she really wants to associate her solo work with the H-Town revival, she’s going to have to do a lot better than this.-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-301363-videos--Beyonc

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For all I know, the Houston rappers might all privately loathe each other.  Paul Wall, I recently learned, wasn’t always on the best terms with Chamillionaire; they’re supposed to have made up their differences, but you hear the same stuff about Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter.  It’s immaterial for two reasons.  As long as the cameras are rolling, these guys act like family; second, they’ve all got legitimate respect for elder statesman Bun B.  Bun sets the tone for contemporary Houston rap with a rhyme-style that’s world-weary, inclusive and welcoming, but always tough as hell.  One of the reasons that Trill, his long-awaited solo album, is so absurdly moving is that he expresses his love for his city, his streets, and his comrades with a certainty that doesn’t require legitimation.  He has now blessed so many cuts and appeared in so many videos that MTV Jams has begun to take on the authoritative character of a Bun B-hosted variety show.  So when the master called his disciples to the table, as he has in the remix clip for “Draped Up”, there was never any question about attendance; just about all the H-Town faces we’ve become accustomed to over the past year and a half are present.  The H-Town All-Stars remix functions as something of a victory lap for the scene; one last parade of candy paint, spinners, rims, and veiled references to sizzurp before everybody involved in this uprising needs to get back to the studio and start work on those difficult follow-ups.  Like all victory laps, there’s something exhilarating about it: call me a sucker for shout-outs, but these guys really do feel like a community, willing participants in a conspiracy to make their beloved metro area the superstar.  Five months ago, Hurricane Rita was swirling in the gulf, and all of Houston got on I-10 and I-45, looking to dodge the fate of those trapped in New Orleans.  Port Arthur, Bun B’s hometown, took the worst of it: winds close to 120 miles per hour, and general flooding all over the city.  P.A.T. is still there, and so is Bun, still a big-brother figure to a generation of emcees whose pride in the Dirty South ought to put FEMA, and the rest of America, to shame.  “We’ll see you in February”, sums up Bun B at the end of his rap, “at the All-Star Game”.  He’s could be talking about basketball, or his compadres; either way, thank God for that.-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-305608-videos--Bun-B

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