Donald Glover isn’t the only actor using his downtime to drop new music lately. Fellow Atlanta star Lakeith Stanfield — fresh off the release of The Photograph a little over a month ago — premiered his first album single, “Fast Life,” on GQ today. The video, which borrows portions of the classic film Casablanca and is directed by “Three Dead Crows” finds a dappered-up Stanfield enjoying a romantic rendezvous and even doing the Joker dance down the same steps from that movie.
However, despite the video’s celebratory nature and the upbeat tempo of the song itself, there’s a dark undercurrent in the lyrics — a “behind-the-scenes” sense of melancholy and menace that Stanfield wanted to capture. “I imagined being in a tuxedo in a very fancy place and dancing,” he told GQ. “And it also made me think about abuse and addiction, which is why this record’s about drug use and things of that nature.”
Of his upcoming album, he says, “It’s basically a journey of me coming from nothing, moving into Hollywood, into a whole other type of darkness, and having to adjust to the loss and pain that comes along with that… Sometimes I try to walk through life without letting the trauma of my past affect me. But sometimes it still does. This is about how you get through moments like that.”
Watch the video for “Fast Life” above.
