Teyana Taylor - How You Want It？ (HYWI？) ft. King Combs

What this video is

Released August 2, 2019, 'HYWI?' arrived during a sustained late-2010s wave of 90s hip-hop and R&B nostalgia, when artists, labels, and streaming platforms were actively repackaging Bad Boy-era iconography for millennial and Gen-Z audiences. The video's structural conceit — recreating canonical Hype Williams-era shots frame-for-frame — functions simultaneously as fan tribute, directorial statement of intent, and…

Why it matters

A key 2019 document in the late-2010s R&B/hip-hop nostalgia cycle, demonstrating how contemporary Black women artists leveraged self-direction to reclaim authorship over the male-gaze-heavy visual language of 90s hip-hop video production. The video's intertextual density — sampling both the song…

The director

Teyana Taylor (b. 1990, New York City) is a multi-hyphenate R&B singer, actress, dancer, and director signed to G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam. She emerged as a director under the credit 'Teyana "Spike Tee" Taylor' (also rendered as 'Spike Lee' Taylor in some…