It’s been a minute since we’ve had a video roundup, and in the meantime our friends have been killing it. Let’s take a look at what’s been going down…

DANI DEAHL – POCKET PORN

Last summer, we made our first trek over to Sound Bar to shoot backstage photos of the dancers for the Dani Deahl’s Pocket Porn video. The song, featuring lyrics by Sue Choe, is pure pop candy, as pink as poprocks or the trademark streaks in Dani Deahl’s; it’s catchy as all hell, based on an inside joke, and 100% googlebait. The video has Dani eluding a cadre of mysterious g-men by raising a pansexual army of glittery disco zombies.

DEATHFACE FT @LILINTERNET – SIX FEET DEEP

Six Feet Deep, a collaboration between Deathface and LILINTERNET, is about as different from Pocket Porn as you can imagine, equal parts rural and suburban, hood and goth, sparkling stillettos are traded for Mishka’s prominent bloodshot eyeball, the 45 degree angles of drapey, gucci goth tunics, the video is full of guns and grills, head-to-toe stick-and-poke tattoos and wicked clown face paint.

The video seems designed to piss people off, not though anything happening visually or aurally, but just by who made it. Deathface, the darkwave dark side of producer Johnny Love, is a remorseless shit-starter, and as the director of Diplo and Nicky Da B’s Express Yourself which led to one of 2012’s biggest memes, and as one of the credited founders of seapunk, pretty much everything LILINTERNET does pisses people off on the internet. But except for the kneejerk Juggalo trigger of trashy white rappers in clownface, the video isn’t doing anything outrageous; it’s a celebration of ruralsuburban hip hop trash, an American analogue to an early Die Antwoord video.

A part of me wishes/fears a collaboration between Deathface and Hunter Moore, but despite their shared love of beefing, oversharing, and trolling for sex on twitter, Deathface takes his music, and music in general, way too seriously for that to ever happen, and the world/internet will have to implode through some other means.

TREATED CREW

On the opposite side of that same rap spectrum where white trash meets goth is the Treated Crew’s blend of streetwear and high fashion. This is a group whose first release was a limited edition LP, packaged with a satin snapback Starter cap, but their videos for Whip are still shadowy, dark and darkly funny, and damn near monochromatic.

CEREBRAL VORTEX X COBRA KRAMES – ZIPLOXXX

Continuing this trend of darkness in hip hop, of shaky closeups and thriftstore extravagance (don’t even think of Macklemore), our own Stefan Klapko directs a video for a collaboration between our old friends Cerebral Vortex and Cobra Krames. If that spectrum I was talking about is a real thing and not something I just made up, Ziploxxx sits right in the center.

SHOW YOU SUCK – THE RETURN OF HEADBANGER’S BALL

very much in the same style as the videos above, Show You Suck’s The Return of Headbanger’s Ball is a rap tribute to metal, both it’s aggressive dark side and its overtly, silly side, through Beavis and Butthead, and Beavis and Butthead on a bad mushroom trip, through dimebags as reference to Pantera’s murdered frontman and dimebags as, simply, a reference to dimebags (just like Freud said!), and of course, through the eponymous Mtv show referenced in the song’s title.