It’s safe to say that with the Black Panther soundtrack blazing up the charts, Top Dawg Entertainment’s stock is on the rise. In the video for “King’s Dead” from the aforementioned hot-selling album, Jay Rock, Kendrick Lamar, and Future portray that idea pretty literally.
The three MCs are all business as their stock-trading coworkers lose their collective cool in the background, intercut with scenes of the boys rapping from the branches of a palm tree (with Kendrick snacking on an elote, no less). The video also includes some stunning surface-to-air shots of the trio rapping the hook from the roofs of a business park and murky, surveillance video-inflected footage of an alleyway scrap, as well as a wild, “don’t-try-this-at-home-kids” shot of Kendrick rapping his “all hail King Killmonger” verse from the middle of a busy intersection, complete with a passing Metro bus and cars doing donuts around him.
TDE has had some absolutely stellar visuals in the past — some quite literally — but they’ve truly outdone themselves on the Black Panther soundtrack promo. From the sneaky initial reveal of their involvement to the masterful rollout, Top Dawg has absolutely aced the promotion on this one, despite a few bumps along the way. Of course, the film itself hits theaters tomorrow, February 16.
