Schoolboy Q - Nightmare on Figg Street
A$AP Ty Beats , whose Facebook describes him as “just a youngin’ in the game”, most famously produced A$AP Rocky’s Peso and Purple Swag . The beat that smoulders through this latest Schoolboy Q track, though, shows that the eighteen year old producer is not just in the game, but on top of it.
This Jerome D. Hurd -directed clip for ‘Nightmare on Figg Street’, taken from Schoolboy Q’s second album Habits & Contradictions , prowls through darkness like a predator and rolls through the streets like a menace, dragging its viewer semi-consciously through a barrage of signs and symbols that tell you to know your place. This is Schoolboy at his assured finest, cutting a terrifying figure on the landscape of rap as he wields Jay Z’s ‘Ni**as In Paris’ hook with the same violence that he wields a baseball bat in the video.
Shifting hazily from darkness to light, from straight-up rap to narrative-driven scenes, and from sex appeal to stone cold threats, this is a video soaked in the quietly venomous, self-assured sneer of the track. Watch it now.
Top Dawg Entertainment released ‘Habits & Contradictions’ on 14th January 2012.