YG - Pop It, Shake It ft. DJ Mustard

What this video is

Released May 2017 at the height of DJ Mustard's production dominance in West Coast hip-hop, 'Pop It, Shake It' strategically deployed the Trinidad Carnival — one of the world's most recognized dance and costuming festivals — as both visual spectacle and cultural bridge between Black American rap and Afro-Caribbean diasporic celebration. Director X, himself of Trinidadian descent, brought authentic geographic and…

Why it matters

The video crystallizes the 2013–2018 DJ Mustard 'ratchet' production era's visual grammar: sun-saturated exteriors, movement-first editing, and the conflation of geographic spectacle with dance-anthem energy. As a YG-Mustard collaboration — one of the defining creative partnerships of mid-2010s…

The director

Julien Christian Lutz (born October 31, 1975, Toronto, Canada), of Trinidadian and Swiss descent, is a Canadian music video director known professionally as Director X (formerly Little X). A protégé of Hype Williams, he has directed over 100 music videos…