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Kool A.D. Maestro Video
Kool A.D. Maestro Video

OKP Premiere: Kool A.D. Takes Times Square In His New Video For "MAESTRO"

Lenny Kravitz, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Lion Babe, Thundercat, SZA & More Rock The Afropunk Festival 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

Kool AD does as he damn well pleases. Late November saw the release of his gargantuan 100 song mixtape O.K., and even though the MC also has a novel in the works, none of that has stopped him from taking to Times Square to shoot a new video for "MAESTRO." Amidst selfie-snappers, evangelicals, cops, desnudas and Batman impersonators, Kool A.D. spits an especially #Woke batch of verses, questioning the conventional wisdom of America and reframing them as crude jokes. This is unbarred rapping in an unfree world where everything's for sale and even a massive LED American flag can't compete with the blinding brightness of corporate commercials.

Okayplayer is proud to present the premiere of the "MAESTRO" clip, which is at once a dazzling bit of modernity and just a flat-out fun piece of music, with hard-hitting beats and tender keyboard loops courtesy of AMAZE 88. And what about that novel? In an interview, Kool A.D. revealed that it also will be entitled O.K. and is a story that deals with “sex, drugs, art, music, books, pornography, capitalism and its alternatives, crime, violence, race, class, culture, celebrity, obscurity, anonymity, the politics of the day-to-day, apathy, the guilt of “first world” privilege, globalism, the Internet, being broke, being poor, being rich, being in the middle, the “middle class,” class, aspiration, myth, the prison industrial complex, spirituality, detachment, wonder, awe, spectacle, modernity, post modernity, theft, ownership, nature, the sun, the moon, the trees, the mountains, the oceans, the cosmos, mythical gods and real ones, life, death, love, wealth, poverty, racism, just a few things that were running thru my head.” So many of those things play out right in the confines of Times Square; take a trip through the madness with him below and pick up his new mixtape here.