Cinematic Excellence: TDE & their mastery of Videography.

Today we were blessed with not one or two, but three TDE productions in the form of official music videos. Coming off an amazing year TDE has had success with their most prominent artist like Schoolboy Q & former TDE Legend Kendrick Lamar, to even the upcoming acts like Doechii & Producer/artist Kal Banx.

We received two new music videos under Schoolboy Q’s official YouTube account for “THank god 4 me” & “NuNu”, tracks off of the aforementioned Blue Lips album.

In the track titled “THank god 4 me”, we receive a very symbolic and eccentric video that nearly encapsulates every word he raps. This video features perspectives of street life with gritty but perplexing shifts scene to scene. Like most TDE productions it came out flawless & it’s abstract contrast from scene transitions keeps you magnetized to the screen, looking away for a second might cause you to miss something.

The ending of the video even cameos Devin Malik another TDE affiliate.

For the track “NuNu”, we are sent into the rural south. My first initial thoughts were that these home’s resemble the slave & sharecropping homes propped up for enslaved blacks. This lead me to two conclusions, (that could be completely wrong) the first thought being this could be a sense of returning to a sense of home, not in a literal sense but in the same symbolic way that we sometimes reference the “motherland”. The second thought being that this could be symbolic of our black artist basically aligning with a new form of“sharecropping”. This theme also continues (to me) as we can then see a Large Plantation like home appear as Q walks off out of the camera pan, but this time at the top of the manor.

TDE also released another animated visual under their official YouTube account for the Schoolboy Q track “Lost Times” featuring Jozzy. This animated video put a twist on various Disney chratacters we know & love along with a very TDE coordinated twist that also pays homage to African American descendants that created the music.

Within this same week we’ve gotten visual from Kal Banx, featuring Smino & Buddy for the potential hit “HOP OUT CHO FEELINGS” . TDE also had success with SiR & his “Heavy” project earlier this year & the Release of Doechii’s mixtape “Alligator bites” 2 weeks prior. 

TDE has been running circles around the industry with videography for the past decade. It may also help that they’re based on the west coast (Cinema capital) but the production and most importantly Art Direction seems to always be on point from this camp utilizing the many resources available.

(There’s been many more complete projects to release under TDE this year, but our main focus was the cinematic/visual aspect.)

Sources: YouTube , YouTube , PBS , Tallboxdesigns