SHIRT
The homie SHIRT injects art in all that he does. His presentation come across even more captivating to me because he’s one of the rawest emcees out of NYC and just refuses to package his visuals like your typical rapper. The latest example comes by way of his new video for "Cuba" off of last year’s Nike Adidas Records. The United Crates and Bass Estrada produced track’s visuals take us through a history of sorts of NYC in collage form. Says SHIRT of the self produced video:
Cuba video is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Cuba is the ne plus ultra of videos on the ultimate megalopolis.It is also a video of experimental cinema that transposes Walter Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as "Sex," "Commodity," "Downtown," "Subway," and Mapplethorpe.
Cuba is a video designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage.
Well said, check the visuals below, and stay tuned for the next from SHIRT.
