03 Greedo & Kenny Beats - Disco Shit ft. Freddie Gibbs (2020)
Spectacular stop-motion.
As I’ve said in this newsletter before, I have a special place in my heart for animated music videos. But today’s music video features doubles as an auteur feature. Will Child is the claymation / stop motion artist from Leeds, UK who is behind the Disco Shit music video and behind some of the best animated hip hop music videos of our time. I didn’t know that Child’s studio was behind so many great claymation videos actually, until I looked more into this one.
I was already a fan of the “Disco Shit” video, with its dramatic tale of the rise and fall of a cocaine kingpin, its tragicomic atmosphere and general ingenuity. I wanted to know more about Child. It turns out he also directed this similar claymation Miami Vice-esque video for Ramirez, as well as my possible new favorite, this video for Trippie Red’s “Grinch,” where the main character seeks revenge on the Grinch in a gangster movie flip of the Christmas film. Or, as I remembered when I went on this journey, the amazing video for Partynextdoor’s “Loyal,” where Partynextdoor attempts to save his city from giant bikini-clad people.
Ultimately the plots of these short films are less compelling to me than the incredible artwork and production design. The tiny miniature papers and cars, small disco balls, teensy knives and guns, the weed smoke made from cotton balls, and cocktails with real-size umbrellas. The scenes from Miami and Venice Beach painstakingly drawn and painted. I love this one shot in Loyal where one of the characters has on blue eyeshadow and when she blinks, you see the second layer of blue clay on her eyes.
Despite the considerable scale of these projects, Child gets little assistance on these projects. “I do pretty much everything, all the set building, characters etc and shoot it and edit it all myself,” he tells Crack magazine. They’ve been successful enough to launch his new animation studio, Gravy Mercedes (named for a Cam’ron bar from the Diplomats song “I Really Mean It”).
One of Child’s best known films is a short stop motion doc about Pablo Escobar — El Patron, The Pablo Escobar Story. What do you think it is about the cocaine drug trade that makes him want to depict it in clay and feathers?
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