![]() For a while there, Rap City was playing it every single day. It’s fascinating and immersive and overwhelming, and it remains one of the best music videos ever made. The video shows such a collision of money and desolation that your brain can get whiplash just watching it. Juvenile wears crispy white clothes and stands in puddles, staring the camera down. ![]() It’s a visual tone poem, a meditation on snakes and boarded-up houses and above-ground graveyards and neon-color Porsches and ambulance lights and air-conditioner sweat and yellowing eyes. The song’s music video, from director Marc Klasfeld, turned Juvenile’s New Orleans into a whole world unto itself. ![]() It was a James Brown grunt, a simple verbal emphasis: “You brought our tape with a check, ha / You wearin’ a vest, ha / You tryin’ to protect your chest, ha.” Over a beat that sounded like an evil robot’s spicy-food-before-bed nightmare, Juvenile, his New Orleans drawl a mile deep, mercilessly clowned some mysterious, all-pervading “you.” The “Ha” of the title wasn’t a laugh. In the fall of 1998, a 23-year-old rapper named Juvenile had erupted out of nowhere - or, more specifically, out of the CJ Peete housing projects in New Orleans - with a song so profoundly, overwhelmingly Southern that it felt like a transmission from some other, much funkier alien civilization.
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