Videos

Vintage: The Making Of The Pharcyde’s “Drop” Video (Video)

blame it on Meka February 7, 2013


Directed by Spike Jonze

Last week I was talking to a friend about music videos, or more specifically, the lack of creativity in music videos as of late. Granted, the combination of low production budgets for music videos thanks to the industry’s utter failing to keep up with the Joneses, ultimately causing the bottom to fall out from under them and – rather than accepting that their narcissistic, stubborn unwillingness to accept and try change from their old model was at the very least partially responsible for that end result – now wag their fingers at and label the very same people they now fire off their products to in the hopes that they will at most times freely promote their wares to a larger audience as the scapegoat, as well as the fact that it’s pretty much a moot point to spend money on what is essentially a 4-minute-long advertisement for an album in this day and age, means that the days of extravagant videos such as Xzibit’s “What U See Is What U Get” or Diddy’s “Victory” are long over… but that doesn’t mean that rappers have to only resort to “rapping aggressively in front of a camera” for four minutes.

Peep, for example, this old behind-the-scenes clip for The Pharcyde’s “Drop” which was a relatively cheap music video that, ironically, featured the group aggressively rapping in front of a camera for about four minutes while a bunch of random shit was going on around them… except that they filmed the entire thing backwards. That amount of detail – not to mention the countless hours it took for them to memorize their own song in reverse – is something that today’s ADD-addled generation will, sadly, likely never do anytime soon, and is proof that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to make a great music video.