Big Sean, Hit-Boy - What A Life

What this video is

Released October 22, 2021, 'What A Life' arrived as the lead single for Big Sean and Hit-Boy's collaborative EP 'What You Expect' (FF to Def / Def Jam, October 29, 2021), marking Big Sean's first release as lead artist in 2021 and his first under his own FF to Def imprint. The video planted a flag in Detroit — Sean's hometown — as a site of hip-hop cultural pride, and used surrealist visual literalism (live bees,…

Why it matters

The video exemplifies the early-2020s hip-hop trend of high-concept, bar-for-bar lyric-literalism videos: each visual gag maps directly to a specific rhyme, a tradition tracing back to classic rap clip storytelling but amplified by social-media virality calculus. The live-bee stunt became the…

The director

Joe Weil is the founder and president of Psycho Films, a Los Angeles-based production company. A native of St. Louis, MO, raised in Olivette, he began filmmaking in his teens and studied Film Production at the University of Southern California. He is known…