Hip-Hop’s elder statesman, Jay-Z, and his protégé, Kanye West, have returned to the musical equivalent of the visual motion image, and released their video for “No Church in the Wild.” Is it something of a throwback, conjuring the rage against the machine that was once brought forth by rap impresarios like Public Enemy, or is it a mish-mash of things that’s trying too hard to be both prophetic and timely?
When you’ve practically maxed out on all the success a hip-hop career can truly bring, and you’re now holding court in the game while also being solidly in your 30’s and 40’s, one could ask if there’s really anything left to be said. For sure, the middle-aged superstar rapper has talked at length about money, cars, women, sunny locales, yachts, money stacks, Yankee caps, and all other manner of “Big Pimpin” that any meager rapper could imagine or ever hope to aspire to. So what’s left on the agenda? Politics. Well, that makes sense, and really it’s as it should be. What’s the use “flossin” about all the other stuff if the rest of the world is going to shit? At some point you just need to wake up, as Spike Lee would say, and understand the world is a complex, often anarchic place, especially when the economy is fractured, and people are suffering in the fallout.
So, in “No Church for the Wild,” you don’t see the remnants of Jay-Z’s and Kanye’s last video for “Otis” where they brazenly ride around in a stripped down Maybach while they grin and posture for the camera. Gone is the flash and sizzle of the superstar wattage the two, especially Kanye, bring to the table. There will be no assessing Ye’s wardrobe, wondering if there will be a Kardashian or Beyoncé spotting, there’s not even a glimpse of the two rappers or Frank Ocean, the singer who brings about the most haunting bits of the song’s hypnotic hook:
Human beings in a mob
What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God?
What’s a God to a non-believer who don’t believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive? Alright, alright, no church in the wild
No, in this video, which is said to draw inspiration from Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, we see an uprising. A mob, if you will, taking back the streets set off by the lighting and throwing of a Molotov cocktail, a familiar sight as of late. The message is clear, but perhaps it’s a little too stated and staged, which is where the notion of trying too hard to be prophetic and timely comes in. Granted, we hated the use of “No Church in the Wild” as backdrop for the new Great Gatsby trailer. Oh, sheesh. That was so awful and incongruous that it impacted negatively what could have been a decent trailer. But here, the point is driven home so much that it’s about chaos, anarchy, and avenging the oppressed, that the images blur together to the point that you look for Jay-Z and Kanye to appear, not because they should, but because we’ve absorbed all that it has to offer without them.
What do you think? Revolutionary, thought-provoking, and message heavy without the pomp and circumstance you’ve come to expect from the Watch the Throne collaboration, or needs more Chuck D insight?
