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Kanye West - “Touch The Sky”

Slim Thug, Young Jeezy, Killa Kyleon, Slick Pulla & Mannie Fresh - “Diamonds” (Remix)

Bubba Sparxxx & The Ying Yang Twins - “Ms. New Booty”

The Back Wudz & Caz Clay - “I Don’t Like The Look Of It”

M1, K’Naan & Stori James - “Till We Get There”

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Give him this much – he tries to be different. ‘Ye follows the very odd animated clip for “Heard ‘Em Say” with another video that looks nothing like the rest of what’s in heavy rotation on MTV Jams. Here, he plays a daredevil (“Evil Kanyevil”) preparing for a ride in a pencil-thin deathtrap of a rocket. Fans and reporters gather around the launch site to give him five, and to treat him like a superstar. Pamela Anderson is here mainly so Kanye can tongue-kiss her in front of America, but to her credit, she makes the most of her screen time: she gives an over-the-top performance as the beleaguered girlfriend, desperately trying to talk her man out of his stunt. He’s married to the hustle, of course; there’s nothing Anderson can do to dissuade him. The film has been washed out to give it that distinctive mid-Seventies used-car commercial feel, and West cooperates by thickening his goatee and chest hair, and rocking some outrageous polyester threads. The rocket goes up, breaks apart and flames out, and the rapper is shown dancing on the clouds like the Angel of Bling. Once again, Kanye West dies at the end of his video.

Now, there’s two ways you can look at this. You can take the literalist approach and see the video as a dramatization of the song’s most prominent line: “I think I died in the accident, ‘cuz this must be heaven”. Or you could call West the owner of rap’s biggest Jesus complex since Nas put out God’s Son. The car crash has become as central to his self-mythology as those nine bullets are to 50 Cent’s. What if, to paraphrase The Game, he hadn’t been able to come back from the collision to beat making and rapping? – that would have been a genuine tragedy for those of us who like hot pop songs. Yet despite his flailing for sympathy in videos such as this one, West has been unable to attach any other epochal significance to his saga. He’s alone in that rocket, see; he’s not taking the ‘hood up (or down) with him. His is a completely personal story, and one that is twice-told to sharpen the outlines of an already outsized character that does not easily fit within the confines of hip-hop culture. Elitists may see this as a mark of the producer-rapper’s superiority to his peers; Time and Newsweek certainly do. But videos like “Touch The Sky” show that Kanye West is as in love – sexual love – with his brush with death as any gat-toting g-rap emcee.  -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtv.com/music/#/music/video/results.jhtml?artistId=1230523

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The satirist is supposed to stand apart from his subculture anyway, commenting from the sidelines; if you are taking yourself seriously enough to act like the Savior of anything, you’re seriously undermining your ability to poke fun at your peers. The members of De La Soul, for instance, were ten times more anti-social and arrogant than Kanye West is on his most insufferable day. But since they were always quick to include themselves in their own critique, they got away with it for awhile. On that landmark second album of theirs, they did everything they possibly could to distance themselves from stylistic expectations and the local hip-hop scene in their hometown of Amityville (“eye hate rap”, confessed Posdnuos in the liner notes). Their early videos, predictably, looked different from anything else that was out at the time – I remember the groupmembers posing on a rock jetty, dressed like Black Studies professors, in the ostentatiously nonconformist “Breakadawn” clip. Their rejection of convention was overt, and aggressive.

No matter what Kanye thinks, Mannie Fresh is the contemporary satirist best able to fill De La’s shoes: for starters, he’s the only guy who is consistently funny enough. But perhaps because he’s more secure with his position in pop culture – or just uninterested in changing social practices by setting a defiant example – his parodies of rap iconography have always been gentle. Gross overstatement is his preferred tool. In the Big Tymers clip for “Oh Yeah!”, for instance, he’s macking on a yacht with a hyperspace drive; when he presses the button and transports the crew from the tropics to the Arctic, all the fly girls, still bikini-clad, are suddenly wearing big fur caps. This is celebratory auto critique rather than a sweeping systemic broadside a la “What They Do”. My guess is that’s just Mannie’s style: commercial rap music has made him, as he’s quick to remind us, a “very very expensive man”, and he has no interest in irritating the golden goose. 

But it’s also the company he keeps. Cash Money Records (where he no longer works) has kept him surrounded by emcees who take the iconography seriously – who, in fact, do everything they can to subordinate themselves to the procession of signifiers that make up the visual vocabulary of the modern rap clip. Nominally, Slim Thug is the star of the “Diamonds” video. Charismatic though he is, he’s essentially a mannequin – a paper doll that can be adorned with a grill, a Houston cap, and designer clothing, and placed in a candy-paint sedan with “24” rims poking out. That he looks great doing it is immaterial: he’s here to represent for a particular subculture, and swear his fealty to its tropes. Most rap videos are like this – the scene, or the community, is the star, and the artist is just a conduit for its celebration, the latest expression of its values. If that sounds like a beautiful thing, have no doubt, it is; that’s what makes rap videos so attractive in the first place. But it makes for an uncomfortable fit for guys like Kanye West and De La Soul.  Mannie is just the producer here; he gets on camera, says some funny and knowing things, and then gets the hell out of the way of the steamroller of subcultural meaning that he’s unleashed.-Tris McCall

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While we’re on the subject of West and rap parodists, consider that the Louis Vuitton Don’s poorest clip – the “New Workout Plan” video – was his most overtly satirical. ‘Ye, who is at his most aristocratically compelling when he’s savaging black upward social mobility, turned his sights on fitness infomercials and the women who buy them. Needlessly nasty and distracting, the clip only served to reinforce two impressions we’d already gotten: that West was developing a very personal and particularly insidious style of misogyny, and that he’d come to think of himself as a really handsome guy. Now, Bubba Sparxxx is ugly as the hogs he often rhymes about, and he holds himself like he knows it. But with “Ms. Fat Booty”, he’s made the clip – and the point – that West was trying to make. 

Getting taken to school by Bubba Sparxxx on anything is pretty humiliating, and I can’t imagine they’re too happy about this one up in Chicago. Kanye West probably looks at this video as a ripoff, and of course it is. But where West wasted screen time on Farnsworth Bentley and his stupid violin, Sparxxx is assisted immensely by his own fly girls, who react to the wondrous Ms. Fat Booty product with expressions of true comic ecstasy. Sparxxx and an unctuous TV host shill their wares: a shoebox filled with magical light that transforms otherwise unremarkable women into genuine, first-rate ass dancers. As the rapper plays the delivery man – going door to door like Big Boi in the “Ghettomusick” clip – the “studio audience” testifies effusively. The extras talk over the track as unapologetically as they do in the “New Workout Plan”, but as you’re not missing much more than Bubba’s “rapping” and the Ying-Yang Twins screaming “booty, booty, booty, booty” in something frighteningly like harmony, it’s no major loss. -Tris McCall.

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-299983-videos--Bubba-Sparxxx

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Sparxxx is a satirist of sorts and has always been, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe in his product. If there ever was such a thing as a rear end in a box, I have no doubt that he’d be out on streetcorners distributing it to all comers. The rapper-as-candyman has been an intermittent video trope for many years now, but lately’s it’s been cropping up in some funny places. For instance, the latest promo clip from Get Rich Or Die Trying (the movie, not the album) finds the usually ungenerous 50 Cent offering the keys to the kingdom to a lucky fan. The walls that divide the phantasmagoric world of international rap superstardom and Joe Schlubhood aren’t usually portrayed as permeable; they’re guarded with the monolithic secretiveness of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Speaking of Veruca Salt and et.al., The Back Wudz are off-the-wall enough to stick a chorus of oompa-loompas in their latest single – and they’re also big enough fans of classic kids’ lit to follow the reference through to its logical conclusion. Here, magic golden keys, discovered by fans, guarantee entry into a hip-hop candy shop. Just as the velvet rope parts for Charlie, and he’s allowed backstage, The Back Wudz share their behind-the-scenes magic with a chosen few. 

But this is A-Town rap, so the “candy” here isn’t chocolate, or lollipops, or even cocaine: it’s the shiny paint they’ve sprayed on their Caddies. The lucky winners get to ogle the cars, hang with some funky little kids that didn’t make the cut for the latest Missy Elliott video, and watch dancers in pink wigs work their routines in front of vaguely psychedelic backdrops. The Back Wudz themselves are dressed in bad pimp outfits that will not dispel their bad reputation for gratuitous zaniness. In isolation, all the things we’re shown are pretty cool: many a great video has been built on the bedrock of ass choreography, goofy emcees, and expensive automobiles. But this time, we’re promised something more; a trip inside the magic kingdom, not a rehash of the same-old in dayglo packaging. The Back Wudz candy factory is more Austin Powers than Roald Dahl, and enjoyable as this is, they deserve mild criticism for raising unrealistic expectations. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mtvu.com/music/playlist/

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An emcee like M1 – all leftist politics out on his sleeve – would probably argue that all commercial rap videos raise such unrealistic expectations. The door to fantasyland is permanently shut, even to wealthy recording artists, and dangling glittering status symbols in front of viewers only serves to make the deprivation more painful. To M1 (and K’Naan, who fled Somalia after its flimsy government was shredded to tatters by civil war), the Willy Wonka metaphor is only too apt. Golden tickets are distributed to a precious few, while the masses spend their money on chocolate bars in the vague hope that one will turn up, thereby whisking the lucky winner from a drab life to one filled with 24s, Cadillac doors, and princess cuts. I sympathize. But if you take away the golden tickets, what, really, is left? Isn’t the promise that a golden ticket is out there, somewhere, the engine upon which all American cultural production operates?

M1 and K’Naan aren’t buying. Instead, they shoot their “positivity” clip in a different kind of factory: an inner city school. The two emcees address the smiling students, who sit bolt upright in their chairs, for Black History Month. The rappers actually use the blackboard and assembled visual aids, and the children pay attention; this is, I move, about as realistic as a candy plant filled with oompa-loompas. Later, they all walk out of the building together, and construct their cipher around a chalk drawing of Africa. Corny? You bet. But the sincerity with which these two very different emcees rap about togetherness and cross-cultural awareness bleeds into the clip, which manages to be relaxed, immediate and ultimately moving. Liberated from the obligation to floss, M1, K’Naan, and singer Stori James are free to dress like the good-looking human beings that they are. In leather jackets and sharp hats, they clasp hands and ask the audience to reject divisive politics and stand under the banner of united humanity. During a week of nothing but bad news and gun violence at home and abroad, it’s a message I’m happy to get.

-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://www.singingfool.com/musicvideo.asp?PublishedID=48530

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