Watch Baroque Paintings Come To Life In Naturally Born Strangers’ “Jameson Ave” Video
It’s a tale as old as time.
Together, Toronto rappers Rich Kidd, Tona, and Adam Bomb make up the hard-hitting hip-hop trio Naturally Born Strangers. Their 2014 full-length debut, The Legends League Presents: Naturally Born Strangers, conceptualized in collaboration with the cult streetwear brand The Legends League, earned NBS a Juno Award for Best Rap Recording. Today, after many months of careful post-production work, the video for "Jameson Ave," a classic, boom-bap-y cut off the project, is finally here.
Director RT! found twin inspiration and thematic prompts in the song's hook—Catch me on the corner of Jameson Ave./ Drunk and disorderly, chasing ass—and in the long-gone era of classical painting and portraiture. Watch above as he applies old tropes to a new reality, featuring a lot of drunken partygoers, naked women, and even a marauding Rob Ford—all reimagined as baroque paintings come to life.
"The video is a tribute to wild nightlife, where memories are like messy dreams. The imagery is based on the Baroque era of classical painting that mythologized larger-than-life figures and events, and didn’t shy away from showing debauchery, violence, and sex," RT! told The FADER in an email. "It took inspiration from a bunch of classical painters and paintings but in some cases reality was stranger than fiction."