Nyck @ Knight - "Off The Wall"

Pro Era is a Brooklyn crew with some talented folks. They're a close parallel to the Save Money posse I was slandering just yesterday. They're led by Joey Bada$$, who has two heavy, impressive LPs under his belt though some Sony vanity imprint. He's been on late night talk shows and done well for himself. Just like Chance from Chicago, lots of women you know have heard of him; more than you think.

They've also got rapper/producer Kirk Knight, who has been building a damn solid catalog on both fronts. He's on the beats here, with his signature blend of stadium pop arrangements and deep cut boom-bap. Pro Era has a deep bench. They're also super woke on the race question -- this was their actual logo until Lyor Cohen intervened:

Signs of the times, innit? What with all Kanye's Confederate merch, you'd swear we were slouching towards Post-Racial America. Or something.

No matter what city or cornball decade you're from, though, all crews get ravaged by that mighty sculptor, time. The Pareto Principle is a cold, merciless bitch. Applied to you and your homies, that means most of you won't make it -- most of you won't even amount to footnotes.

This is a cool video, in other words.

Jack Begert & crew deliver a sweetly calibrated 80's-ass VHS-gloss After Effects buffet. I talk abundant shit, but this is dope. Somewhere between Kung Fury and lo-fi Adult Swim promos, and always entertaining. Sure, having your lead performer hop off an actual wall on camera dozens of times might be an obvious treatment, yes. But there's enough ideas here to keep it moving.

Nyck Caution is an earnest NYC cat on the same Russell Jackson / Curtis Simmons trip as anyone else from Gotham. Or at least, anyone else like him: that's a diverse city, but there are roughly thirty thousand other Nyck Cautions there right now.

Kirk Knight is a whole other animal; he's doing the hook, the beats and then he steals the show on that third verse. This is someone with a long career ahead of them, a careful student of the game.

Overall, pure money product. Three Dickies, which is perhaps unfair -- this may deserve four. These mogs will survive either way.

Joey Bada$$ - “Victory”

When someone said we absolutely had to check out the latest music video from NYC true-school savior Joey Bada$$, I didn't realize they were fucking with us. Probably should have seen that coming.

"Victory," you see, is an advertisement for both Mountain Dew and the National Basketball Association. This is One Of Those Things that rapping-ass rappers have to do; your boy Chance funded two years of his life doing this for the turtleneck fascists at Apple, Rakim had to pay respects to the hip hop legend that is Sprite, and Common buys rare Dilla beats thanks to brands like Lincoln and Microsoft. It's not like anyone is out here paying them for rap music, so they had to diversify. These things happen.

The beat is cleverly composed and the hook is overcooked as fuck. Curtis Jackson could probably sue if he got bored. The video looks like an advertisement for fatally caffeinated diabetes juice should: colorful, sharp, and gently seizure-inducing. It looks very much like they saved big money by shooting this at an EDM festival before the gates opened that day. Do The Dew, right?

The verses are at least clever, for whatever clever is worth. I know it takes GZA time to write a song like "Labels" or "Fame," but I also know those songs are corny as fuck. Joey weaves a bunch of team & player names into some raps. It's mostly paint-by-numbers with flashes of dope (like "every day another triple double entendre" - this is Joey, after all).

So: how do we rate this? Such quandaries would be agonizing if I wasn't getting drunk. The fact of the matter is, nothing could ever redeem product placement trash like this. Nothing against Joey Bada$$, but someone has to have some motherfucking standards around here.

"Christ Conscious" - Joey Bada$$

Big, loud, pretty and boring. This cat has done way better with the bars, but so what? The video sells itself. The Alex Grey / Kris Kuksi bling and CGI ornamentation is fucking gorgeous and Mr. Bada$$ sells every frame -- shit might not amount to much, but at least he really means it.

...but so what? You could have put Viper on camera the whole time and it would still be a compelling watch. This is a snarling, mescaline-spiked cathedral of a video and it's all built on top of a single verse. So props due to director M-I-E, who clearly had a much bigger hand in the final product than simple editing. Since Greatness is always a team effort, props to the animators, too: Yukai Du, Richard Payne, John L. Wilkinson and Richard Payne.

Joey's got a big team behind him, too, and he's gearing up for a big 2015. This video was on MTV, perhaps that still means something and I hope it does. History will probably show this video had a "Yonkers" level impact -- history always laughs at me, blood and shrapnel and screaming civilians in his bloody, mile-wide incisors. I was wrong, I am wrong, I will be wrong again.