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Slim Thug featuring Bun B & Pharrell Williams - “I Ain’t Heard Of That”

Smitty - “Diamonds On My Neck”

Pretty Ricky - “Your Body”

David Banner - “Play”

Three 6 Mafia - “Stay Fly”, aka “Stay High ”

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Watching rap videos is like going to church. You get the same procession of luminous decontextualized signifiers; the same run of intensely portentious images, the same spotlight on the speaker. Good directors line up the sacraments in proper procedural order: the ice, the rims, the cars, the girls. Hype Williams and Paul Hunter didn’t build this church, but they’ve probably done more to standardize the liturgy than anyone else has. Hip-hop iconography is derived from the songs themselves, of course, but it was Williams who perfected the visual presentation of its tropes, and Hunter who popularized the images. Consider, for starters, Hunter’s clip for “Drop It Like It’s Hot” – jewelry, cigars, luxury cars, booty-shaking dancers in front of marquee lights, each image in the sequence given equivalent weight. Hunter and Williams are both boss at framing objects of conspicuous consumption for maximum worship. A Hype Williams spot makes the rapper appear like the biggest rock in a diamond necklace: surrounded by a skein of so much glittering and gleaming that some of the bling is bound to be refracted on the star and the song. Now, Snoop Dogg is easy – he’s so naturally iconographic that the director has tremendous creative latitude; sleepy-looking Slim Thug presents more of a challenge. But just as the production on “I Ain’t Heard Of That” extends the sound of Snoop’s ’04 smash (which was, itself, a revision of “Grindin’” by Clipse), Williams’s clip for the Boss of the South can be seen as a refinement of the visual aesthetic of the “Drop It Like It’s Hot” video. First of all, it’s in high-contrast black and white. Then, it’s got the same clinical and still pacing: each discreet image is either presented in slo-mo or in effective isolation; Williams is a master at eliminating conceptual interference. And both have goofy, off-the-wall performances from notorious camera hog Pharrell. He doesn’t leave a footprint in Snoop’s house, but here, his preposterous grill and funny hand signals nearly steal the show. Bun B drops by for a verse, too. Now that the rap stars of Coastal Texas has been fully integrated into the canon, the UGK frontman is suddenly as omnipresent as Ludacris. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-4622085-videos--Slim-Thug

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The most famous setting for Hype Williams’s video is a purely fantastic one: the long, electrically illuminated hallway down which the rapper slowly advances toward the camera, sometimes shadowed by his lackeys, sometimes by himself, eyes bulging and gesticulating, carrying money or Courvorsier or jewelry, behaving like an Unstoppable Force.  Mase made the walk, as did Busta, as did Missy Elliott.  Fashions change, and it appears that the veteran director has retired the hall.  But Williams digs patterns, and never throws away ideas – if he does something in one video that strikes his fancy, chances are, he’ll be replicating it in his next few productions.  Lately, the director has trotted out a formal innovation that’s bold, if nothing else – a variation on the cinematic, wide-screen letterboxed look that’s been a staple in music videos since “Hungry Like The Wolf” at least.  Williams slides a main image in between another one that’s split between the top and bottom bars.  At first glance, it looks like three videos happening at once. Upon closer inspection, the relationship between the two images becomes clearer, even if it is often tangential.  In both the “I Ain’t Heard Of That” and “Diamonds On My Neck” clips, the rapper rhymes from between the two halves of a video girl.  The effect is intriguing, but, to be honest, it’s disorienting, too.  I trust Hype Williams’s instincts, and he gets points for indulging his experimental impulses, I guess.  But scrambling and splicing the standard iconography like this doesn’t have the metaphorical potency that Williams seems to think it does.  So I sorta wish he’d just cut it out.  The “Diamonds” clip works a bit better than the Slim Thug video does, principally because it’s in color, and it’s easier to disaggregate the shots.  Smitty is also a more compelling presence than Slim Thug is – or perhaps he’s just a bit more dexterous on the mic, and that translates into an easier face to follow through the carnival.   .-Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-20052481-videos--Smitty

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Slim Thug and Hype Williams use the “I Ain’t Heard Of That” clip to show off Houston a little.   You don’t get the same you-are-there vibe present in the “Still Tippin’” clip, but at least there are some gratuitous shots of street signs.  Hey, I’m not complaining: if you want to have a good handle on the hip-hop lexicon, it helps to get your geography tight.  The first third of the “Diamonds On My Neck” clip, on the other hand, is a virtual travelogue through Smitty’s native Little Haiti neighborhood.  The video ends up in a generic Miami nightclub, sure – but much of the footage crammed between the letterboxes shows vibrant images of fish restaurants, grungy apartments, sidewalk scenes; a drive-by panorama of a south Florida hood that looks wildly real.  The focused, non-bored Hype Williams would have sculpted this footage into a monument to Smitty’s troubled upbringing.  Instead, we’re treated to hints only, and fleeting ones, at that.  Now, Smitty is just about the hottest thing on the Miami underground, and even though you might not have heard “Diamonds On My Neck” yet, it’s been burning up the Sunshine State since mid-summer.  Pretty Ricky, as far as I can tell, has no relationship to Florida other than their evident debt to 2 Live Crew’s foul-mouthed oeuvre.  But they’re Miami natives, too, and they’re keen to show off the features of their home city that matter most to them: the freeway, the waterfront skyline, and the beach.  Now, this has been S.O.P. for 95 South-loving emcees since Wreckx-N-Effect zoomed in a poom-poom, but Pretty Ricky manages a stylish take on the usual seaside shenanigans.  Raunchy they are for sure, but when it comes to cinematography, they’ve gotten surprisingly arté .  Cool blues, warm yellow and greens fill the palate, stop-start images and black frames freeze the shots; even the footage of guys playing Frisbee in the ocean and cars on the Interstate look sun-dappled and slo-mo.  That’s not to suggest that Pretty Ricky’s exuberance doesn’t pervade the clip – just that their notoriously trashy aesthetic hasn’t translated into the expected crummy image quality.  The video ends with a night-time shot of the Miami skyscrapers that could be framed and hung in a gallery.  Go figure.        -Tris McCall.

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-17879001-videos--Pretty-Ricky

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Speaking of frustrating expectations, David Banner had every hipster in America drooling for his follow-up to the two Mississippi albums that established him as an unlikely “conscious” emcee.  Those who picked up Certified have found their faith rewarded.  But if you just heard the single and watched the video, you’d be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. “Play”, a virtual rewrite of “Wait” by the Ying Yang Twins, is a straightforward whispered come-on that is easily dismissed as bandwagon-riding.  Banner defended the single by calling it part of producer Michael “ColliPark” Crooms’s grand design (Crooms also did “Wait”, in case you couldn’t figure that out from listening to the two songs), and surely he’s right.  But no matter how justifiable the project might have been, it still seems a little silly to watch a guy who lent his tour bus to Hurricane Katrina victims effectively imitate a duo who believe “beat the pussy up/ beat the pussy up” is an acceptable chorus.  Perhaps to compensate, the “Play” video is about as far from the “Wait” clip as you can get while still retaining all the sweaty, half-naked girls.  Where the Ying Yang Twins were shot in glossy black and white, David Banner and company are shown in flat, lurid primary colors.  The video girls in the “Wait” clip lay passively on their backs as the Atlanta emcees crawl all over them; Banner’s girls sit at exercise machines and pump iron while the emcee sits back and reads the newspaper (the business section, of course).  Despite the best labors of their cosmetologists, the Ying Yang duo look pencil-necked puny, and as though they’re about to be swallowed by their suits.  Banner, on the other hand, is big and muscular, and, when given an opportunity, exudes a natural authority.  Hopefully, he’ll get a chance to use that presence in a follow-up clip.  The “Play” video offers glimpses of what makes Banner special, but to the uninitiated, there’s not enough here to distinguish him from dozens of other rappers.           -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-298690-videos--David-Banner

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Mostly what I want to see from David Banner is some goddamned images of Mississippi.  For Pete’s sake, he’s the only emcee of national profile that the state has ever produced.  On record, he raps constantly about his home.  Can’t he show us around?   I thought this whole campaign to fetishize the Dirty South was a backlash against twenty years of footage of the Triborough Bridge and the Hollywood sign.  Like UGK, Three 6 Mafia has done their level best to balance the scales, but since we’ve all been busy ignoring their music so we can rock out to Ja Rule, we haven’t noticed.  They named their album Most Known Unknown for a reason: after more than a decade of representing Memphis and sizzurp in equal measure, these guys probably figure it’s time for their payday.  Dazzling as it is, most of the “Stay Fly” video is about introducing the act.  Joined by fellow River City rappers Eightball and MJG, the Mafia take turns addressing the camera as they walk through the lobby of a swank hotel.  As each subsequent rapper grabs the lead, the film freezes, and a title appears.  Learning who these guys are is only half the fight, though; if they weren’t so engaging, it wouldn’t matter at all.  Despite their glowering image and their rep as the group that drugged the South with purple, the Three 6 Mafia have always been really funny guys – and that’s apparent here.  The direction is dynamic, too: the candy-colored footage swings backward and forward, slows down to a digital crawl, and staggers from frame to frame like a bowling-alley drunk.  Images wipe from scene to scene, often on the beat.  It’s like a pixillated MPEG, forbidden, dizzying, and tough to take your eyes away from.  There are videos out right now that are as good as this one, but there aren’t any better. Let’s hope it doesn’t take them another ten years to return to heavy rotation.      -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-267571-videos--Three-6-Mafia

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