Watch Kendrick Lamar Run Amok in Playful ‘For Free? (Interlude)’ Video
Kendrick Lamar has dropped the new music video for “For Free? (Interlude),” a jazzy, Last Poets-inspired cut off the rapper’s acclaimed To Pimp a Butterfly. Clocking in at just over two minutes, Lamar furiously packs plenty of amusing moments in this Joe Weil and the Little Homies-directed video as Lamar chases a woman around a palatial estate, reminding her around every turn, “this dick ain’t free.”
Compared to the triumphant homecoming “King Kunta” clip and the powerful, thought-provoking “Alright” video, “For Free? (Interlude)” finds Lamar showing his more playful side. The video opens with the scantily clad woman relentlessly states her demands into her cellphone on the mansion’s balcony. From there, Lamar plasters his face against a screen door, window shades burst open to reveal Lamar and the rapper comically pursues the woman repeatedly around a circular fountain.
However, there is a deeper meaning under the impishness. Much of the video’s patriotic and racial imagery – an Uncle Sam in the introduction, Lamar himself later assuming that red, white and blue costume to shovel coal into the estate’s heating system, Jim Crow-era statues of black servants and other split-second images – ties in with the penultimate “For Free?” lyric, “Oh America, you bad bitch / I picked cotton that made you rich / Now my dick ain’t free.”
The video ends in trippy fashion with an army of Lamars – some drinking champagne, some playing croquet, one reading a book under a tree and another sitting atop a gold minivan similar to that from the good kid, m.A.A.d. city deluxe cover – in the front of the mansion. A two-minute segue was an unlikely pick to get a high-quality, sumptuously shot visual accompaniment, but “For Free? (Interlude)” is a welcome and stunning addition to To Pimp a Butterfly‘s growing video library.