A$AP Rocky Captures Youth Gone Wild in ‘Riot Rave’ Video
The montage of misbehaving teens knocking over garbage cans, setting off bottle rockets and possibly misappropriating Disney-owned footage from Beauty and the Beast in A$AP Rocky and Baauer’s collaboration “Riot Rave” is a milder version of the World War II scenes that the no-goodnik in Clockwork Orange had to watch as rehabilitation at the end of the movie.
Rocky spends the first minute or so of the clip reading a “warning” about the scenes of rioting to come (“Shit got real,” he says very, very slowly), but the visual arrangement of the scenes – sandwiched between two-headed leopards and close-ups of flames – lessen its impact. Then again, since the track comes from an all-instrumental A$AP project called Beauty and the Beast: Slowed Down Sessions, Ch. 1, maybe it’s meant to be a slow burner.
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While his fans process “Riot Rave,” the 25-year-old Harlem rapper has cast a net wider than his fan base with the second Beauty and the Beast video. That clip, “Unicorn,” features a slowed down version of indie rockers Tame Impala’s track “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” off their 2012 album Lonerism. The video itself zooms in and out of the record’s cover cartoon, but Rocky has found a way to make the track even more introspective and sad with a snail’s-pace tempo. Maybe there’s more to Rocky than “A$AP.”
The rapper has not yet announced a release date for the record. According to Pitchfork, it’s rumored to become available as a free download this summer.