Accept Kool A.D. as your spirit guide, let him do your chart, let him tell you what’s good with the world. According to the horoscopes he’s been doing for Paper Magazine, this month all the end of summer babies should “eat some pineapple,” and “front [him] like a pound of O.G kush”, but according to the California rapper and member of Das Racist, his star mapping duties are “not always an exact science”. So who knows what you should really be doing? Perhaps watching the new video for the song “Hickory” feat. Talib Kweli and Boots Riley off his most recent album Not O.K.
The video comes around the same time as an impromptu and exceedingly dope collab with Toro Y Moi, which you should waste no more time not listening to and was directed by Peruvian graphic design company Youth Experimental Studio. Being composed entirely of watercolor paintings, the video plays pretty neatly into Kool A.D.’s proclivity for visual stimulation. The animations, coming in waves of 24 paintings per second, aesthetically don’t feel too outside the vein of the drawings he posts to Instagram; which range anywhere from strictly hilarious to really thoughtful.
Visually the video for “Hickory” captures a kind of extremely visceral, multi-chromatic, existential milieu that successfully accents Kool A.D.’s kind of lazy (in the coolest sense) delivery, without losing the ability to accommodate Kweli’s dense high energy lyricism, and Riley’s smooth noticeably southern influenced flow. This video is like watching parts of “The Wall”, if watching that movie could in anyway be a remotely relaxing or casual experience.
