ASAP Rocky continues his streak of surrealist video takes on his Testing album standouts with a ‘Gunz N Butter’ that features provocative imagery of Klansmen burning crosses, angry young men preparing for terroristic actions, and exploding classrooms full of crash test dummies.
The dummies are a motif that have appeared throughout the promotional material for Testing (videos for “F*kk Sleep” and “ASAP Forever“), as have scenes of hectic violence and mayhem resulting from America’s fascination with firearms (the video for “Sundress“).
However, “Gunz N Butter” might be the first one that provides any sort of wide-ranging implicit or explicit commentary on the destructive power of guns, juxtaposing military-like SWAT police tactics that are often used in inner city neighborhoods to a suburban paradise and using a scene of a young man cleaning weapons while his parents mess around in the next room as a not-so-subtle allusion to mass shooters, who often go unnoticed by those around them until they enact their deadly plans.
Director James Mackel stuffs the video full of oblique indictments of capitalism and militarism, but softens the blow with a more lighthearted scene of Rocky performing to a crowd of exuberant fans before experiencing a epic stage dive fail.
Testing is out now via RCA Records.
