Despite being a mediocre album on the market, Labcabincalifornia birthed arguably the most inventive music videos of its time, paving the way for a future of post-cinematic and imaginative hip-hop which extended beyond the music. Jonze mentions a reversed sample in the song and comments on its inspiration to play it backwards, which sounded inaudible. The group’s agreement to lipsync the reversed track established a new audio-visual relationship for music videos. It invited a new role for musicians who become active members of the video, redefining the meanings created through both mediums.

It also invites a far more engaging process of producer, artist relationship in constructing the video. Jonze refers to the work that almost made him ‘think backwards’ as well as moments with the group thinking about ‘tripping over’ and almost free-styling the idea. This enables a casual yet more intimate approach to filmmaking and reconstructing the music to invent an entirely new experience, which doesn’t leave the audio and visual simply parallel. He also mentions attempts to transcribe the inaudible sounds into lyrics to further blend and blur the verbal aspect of the music which both confusion and meaning making to enhance the video’s impact on the audience.

Turner-Williams argues their attempt to diversify their styles of music videos entered a ‘dangerous ‘guerrilla-style’ territory amidst the height of the Bad Boy Records and Death Row tensions. Jonze was unthreatened in his continuation of counter-culture artistic style and his use of 35mm low wide-angle camera to film different locations in downtown LA, proved to be a worthy vision. His style became fascinatingly unique as he hired a qualified linguistics coach, Robert Belvin, to ensure the backwards lip-reading was seamless. Belvin’s use of cue cards to help the rappers in the video, amplifies the atmosphere of engagement that helps to redefine the post-cinematic aspect of making music videos.

The video was ‘pure surrealism’ in its complete randomness, with their non-sensical movements and times of complete nakedness as they roamed the streets rapping, leaving people ‘gawking’ as they witnessed what would become unprecedented ways of making music videos. The sporadic nature of the video makes it all the more impressive as SlimKid3 mentions ‘You had to keep up. You didn’t know where you were going. You were just going backwards and saying shit… it was pretty magical though.’ Arguably it’s authenticity has become timeless as Turner-Williams mentions its influence can be seen ‘in visuals for current West Coast alt-rap artists like Vince Staples, Flying Lotus’.

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdSrkM9-wiE&ab_channel=NineClubClips

https://www.okayplayer.com/originals/the-pharcyde-drop-is-hip-hops-most-innovative-video.html

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