Shabazz Palaces - Welcome To Quazarz

What this video is

Released July 13–14, 2017, this video serves as the visual gateway to Shabazz Palaces' ambitious dual-album project 'Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star' and 'Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines' — the group's third and fourth albums on Sub Pop, the label for which they became the first hip-hop act signed. The Quazarz albums construct a speculative fiction framework: Quazarz is a sentient being from another universe…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of 2010s experimental/avant-garde hip-hop visual culture, this video represents the maturation of the Black Constellation's Afrofuturist multimedia project. It demonstrates how independent hip-hop in the streaming era could deploy concept-album world-building across music,…

The director

Nirbhai (Nep) Singh Sidhu is a London-born, Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, textile, painting, video, sound, and metal fabrication. His work is rooted in Sikh heritage and Afrofuturist philosophy, linking ancestral…