Will Hagle is amidst a search to find the stunt double in Rick Ross’ “Speedin’ video.
The way CJ Fly sees it, being entwined in an international love triangle and rocking a suit at all hours is just a part of life. Aside from a few minor plot points, that’s essentially the story he attempts to get across in his latest visual. The accompanying soundtrack is “Eyetalian Frenchip,” a cut off last year’s Thee Way Eye See It tape.
The clip is labeled not a music video but a “short film,” because CJ Fly doesn’t lip sync along with the lyrics but remains blank-faced instead, expressionless unless stroking a scraggly goatee expresses something. Rest assured, there are still enough titty, ass, hands in the air to excite the young ones that stay up past their bed time to watch late Friday night BET programming to catch the dirty stuff and/or just log on to YouTube because it’s that easy these days.
Pro Era are Brooklyn boys but this clip borrows from A Bronx Tale, if not thematically then at least literally, via the audio sample that opens the track. Despite the stereotypical audio grab from a De Niro crime drama, CJ Fly frames himself not as the typical mafioso but as a character accidentally entangled in that world. He messes with a girl whose father is Italian and whose family owns a restaurant in Little Italy. That’s the inciting incident of a story that inevitably ends in bloodshed. What happens in between is minimal, especially for a clip with the lofty designation of “short film,” but it’s well-directed and contains enough cool shots to get its point across in the ~3 min runtime.
CJ Fly’s sound is nowhere near the level of the classic artists he (and the entire Pro Era crew) emulates, but he does succeed in his storytelling efforts. The current scenario in the boroughs can be viewed in a couple of ways: Real NY rap is dead and the new guys are just zombies of the old Flatbush, or real NY rap never left, and these guys are just the new torch-bearers. As is the case with most two-sided, black-and-white arguments, the reality is somewhere in that gray middle. You just look at it and see whatever you want. This is the way we need to see it, though: CJ Fly a young guy doing old stuff, and doing it for-the-most-part well. If that’s where we set our expectations, then occasionally an ambitiously dope video like this one will surpass them.
