Lushlife - Magnolia
Sure, you can produce all manner of tech wizardry with CGI and corner-cutting computer software these days, but you can’t quite beat a good old-fashioned labour of love.
The video for Philadelphia MC Lushlife’s breezy new jam Magnolia is most certainly that. With a premise that updates the renowned visuals for Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues for rap, every last word Lushlife delivers is mocked-up using glue guns, marker pens and a monumental amount of cardboard. The mock-ups are then placed on the heads of a variety of individuals – including vicars, graffiti artists and businessmen. Courtesy of some spitfire editing, we race through more than sixty-five locations as the lyrics unfold – the number of locations you might anticipate for a feature film, let alone for a two-and-a-half-minute music video.
The estimated budget for this cardboard odyssey? Less than a hundred bucks. Which is impressive enough, not least for some of the rather elegant moments captured; at one point the model for the word ‘IS’ is caught gliding gracefully through a sun-kissed sky. The closing shot is a fabulous image of Lushlife with all the cardboard creations behind him– quite literally sitting with his rhymes – and a neat reminder of the sheer amount of language amassed across a single rap track. The video was directed by LAMAR + NIK, clearly visual artists worth keeping an eye on. Genuine praise to all involved.
