Torii MacAdams would appreciate if the smog had some chill
Everyone’s got a fucking opinion about Los Angeles. It’s a city receptive to theorizing, a metropolitan area so big any aspersions cast will find a target of some kind. Depending on your perspective, it’s an impenetrable, smog-covered biomass, or it’s a blank slate, still smog-covered. Clipping.’s newest video, for last year’s “Summertime,” believes the latter.
L.A’s an absurd city, and the “Summertime” visuals are appropriately absurdist. Cut-and-pasted green screen shots of rappers Daveed Diggs and King Tee’s facial features replace those of strangers from Venice’s Muscle Beach to MacArthur Park. The gonzo, no-releases-signed filming of “Summertime” is an equalizer–everyone is ripe for lighthearted mockery, be they wildly gesticulating street preachers or beach blonds with watermelon-sized mammaries. This is the perfect backdrop for the songs jangling found-sound instrumental, a more artsy pastiche than usually accompanies lines about talking shit, shooting craps, and bumping 2Pac. Diggs is his usual, tongue-twisting self, but King Tee deserves extra commendation for being 47 years old and not sounding washed up. He and Diggs have a piece of advice for surviving in Los Angeles: “Stop rubberneckin’, you lookin’ sweeter than confection, pause / Laugh it off or get a weapon.”
https://soundcloud.com/clppng/mix2
