Video: 50/50 (Miki Vale & Kandi Cole) – Black
And now here are the dope DJ Deprave-directed visuals for the previously mentioned “Black.” As I was watching this on Youtube, it struck me that it might suck for the two of them to be called 50/50 right now. The cancer comedy flick of the same name popped up on the Video Recommendations sidebar. Which means the movie might be stealing the duo’s thunder and it’s probably hijacking all their SEO juice too. How weird is the game these days that artists might have to worry about the search engine-friendliness of their monikers?
UPDATE: Someone in the comments section took this the wrong way. I clarified my feelings towards “Black”:
Well, I already wrote about the song itself not that long ago (you can read that here) in which I more or less called this Blackstar’s “Astronomy (8th Light)” meets Lil Wayne’s “A Milli.” And I linked to that post about the song in this post about the video.
For the sake of clarity, both “Astronomy” and “A Milli” are dope as shit and “Black” also happens to be dope. 50/50′s “Black” uses the same lyrical conceit as Blackstar’s mission statement–after all, “Astronomy” was the first proper track on the Blackstar album–which is to associate powerful imagery with the term “black” to redefine and/or empower notions of blackness. On the other hand, 50/50′s song takes that elevated, poetic language and concept and puts it into a more energetic context. “A Milli” is an extremely fun instrumental. 50/50′s song also has a very fun instrumental. So the song is poetic. But fun. I had hoped that just the comparison to the two songs would be enough to say this much, but okay, I’ll try to be more clear from now on.
Reading be fun though:
