Spike Jonze’s five best hip-hop music videos
Spike Jonze is one of the most distinct, interesting directors of his generation, known for film masterpieces, from Being John Malkovich to Where the Wild Things Are, and Her, but directing music videos has also played a huge part in his career, seeing him put together promos for a range of huge artists across multiple genres.
Jonze started out as a photographer, shooting BMX races and, eventually, skateboarders, and he later started shooting films, too, such that one of his skateboarding clips caught the attention of Kim Gordon, who, in 1992, recruited him to make a video for a Sonic Youth song. This marked the first of many music videos to come, where he would, over the following decades, make promos for Weezer, Fatboy Slim, Björk, Beck, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, and Arcade Fire, among many other indie darlings.
But he was drawn specifically to hip-hop, the music videos of which are as inventive and groundbreaking as the genre itself, and, arguably, they sit among his best ever creations. Spike Jonze and hip-hop may not, at a surface level, seem to be the most natural match, but there is actually a certain humour, intelligence, and tendency towards the surreal that binds them.
Speaking on the KGSM MediaCache YouTube channel in 2013, Jones shed some light on how he views music videos. “I always thought of music videos as this form where you could do anything, as long as it felt true to the song and the feeling of the song,” he mused, “Those were the videos that excited me the most when I’d see them.” He clearly lives by that logic in his own work, and he does some pretty wild stuff in some of them, but somehow, they remain embedded in the spirit of the music. Here’s a look at five of the best hip-hop ones.
Five best Spike Jonze-shot hip-hop videos
5. The Notorious BIG – ‘Sky’s The Limit’
Jonze’s video for ‘Sky’s The Limit,’ the third and final single from Biggie’s posthumous second album Life After Death, has all the markers of a typical promo video for a rap song of the 1990s. There is the star rapper, dressed in fine clothing, rapping directly down the camera’s lens. There’s the label boss, Puff Daddy, at his shoulder, hyping up his main man. There are scenes of cruising around in a fancy car, of hanging around a pool and enjoying the fruits of luxury, including stepping out in public and being harassed by the paparazzi. It’s fairly run-of-the-mill stuff for the time, except that everyone involved in this particular clip is a child. Rather than having adults star in the video, Jonze cast a bunch of kids!
On the one hand, this is amusing on a superficial level. It’s kind of funny to see the cocky strutting of gangsta rappers reduced to literal child’s play. But the video is by no means mean-spirited, because it also introduces a genuinely warm sense of innocence into Biggie’s work. The real man had just been murdered, and violence between East and West was at its worst around this time, but presenting these kids having fun on a video set served to remind us that rappers, like everyone else, started out as kids with big dreams; there’s a warmth to it that was necessary during such a bleak period.
4. Ludacris – ‘Get Back’
During an interview with Esquire, the rapper and actor Ludacris once spoke of something that truly irritates him in life, and it was fairly specific to being famous. “[One of my] pet peeves in life,” he said, “is going into the restroom and a fan following me in there and trying to have a conversation with me”. That presumably is incredibly annoying, in fairness, but he got to exorcise it after he recruited Spike Jonze to make a video for his 2004 track ‘Get Back’.
The video presents Ludacris, with wildly outsized Popeye hands and arms, using a urinal, when he starts being hassled by a fan who wants to be his manager. Rather than deal with the situation gracefully, Ludacris gets to beat the crap out of the guy, which, given his absurd hands and arms, is magnificently weird to watch. Also, the ‘fan’ he’s beating happens to be played by Fatlip, one of The Pharcyde’s rappers, which makes the skit a triple-decker delight.
3. Kanye West – ‘Flashing Lights’
Ye has, in the past, described the video for ‘Flashing Lights’ as his favourite from his whole career, which is hardly a surprise when we consider who helped him make it. The promo was directed by both him and Spike Jonze, and it was very popular upon its release, winning awards and widely being praised by critics; it’s fair to say that it’s a standout video from that late 2000s era.
The film, which plays out entirely in slow motion, stars the model Rita G, who pulls up in the desert inside a Ford Mustang. She steps out, dressed in a wig, sunglasses, and a fur coat, and begins to strip to her lingerie to set her clothes alight. She then opens up the boot, where Kanye comes into view, bound and gagged. She begins to comfort him in his fear, but then takes up a shovel and begins to stab into the boot, presumably killing him; do with that what you will.
2. Beastie Boys – ‘Sabotage’
The ‘Sabotage’ video has a fair claim to being one of the funniest music videos ever made. It’s a tribute to old cop shows like Starsky and Hutch, and it involves the band members in costume as cops, getting into scrapes. “The wardrobe fitting was where it all began as far as creating the characters,” Jonze once remarked on Directors Label, a DVD series focused on the work of music video directors. He added. “Mike D would start putting on clothes with a salt-and-pepper wig, and he was suddenly the boss, yelling at everyone”. He did mention a spot of regret in this, noting how he still wishes he could have “recorded dialogue ’cause the stuff those guys were saying was so funny, especially when the chief would start chewing out the rookie for pissing on his shoe or something”.
The fast-moving video was so intense to shoot that the team actually ended up destroying two of the cameras they’d rented for it. “The camera was mounted up on the hood,” Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch once remembered of one of the lost cameras, and how it was because they were moving too fast either up or down an incline, which resulted in “the [magazine] go flying off the camera and then the spool actually come out and the film was unrolling, like rolling up an alleyway”.Even the behind-the-scenes seem to be a riot.
1. The Pharcyde – ‘Drop’
The ‘Drop’ video is so clever, and, in the spirit that Jonze cited in that KGSM MediaCache interview, it captures something of the song itself: its trippy, wonky weirdness. The video is reversed, but Jonze and the group filmed it in such a way that it appears to be moving forward, making for a really odd effect that was by no means easy to achieve. It literally involved the rappers listening to their song in reverse, learning how to lip-sync the backwards gibberish that they heard, and, at the same time, walk backwards during the shoot.
“I don’t think any of us realised how hard that was going to be,” Jonze explained at the LA Film Fest in 2013, “But they learned to lip sync to the song backwards, and they’d be like on tour, practicing, it was awesome to see these rappers doing their homework and practicing with their headphones on and lyric sheets.” The truly dedicated director claimed that they had a lingust from UCLA on board to help “transcribe the gibberish phonetically”, which meant that when the video would be flipped to what is the forwards moving ‘normal sequence, the lips would align with what the real rhymes were.