Outkast - Roses

What this video is

Released in spring 2004 during the sustained commercial and critical peak of OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below era, 'Roses' arrived as the fourth single from an album that had already reshaped mainstream hip-hop with 'Hey Ya!' and 'The Way You Move.' The video operates as a theatrical satire of superficiality, using the visual grammar of 1950s-60s Hollywood musicals — specifically West Side Story and Grease —…

Why it matters

A landmark of Southern hip-hop visual culture, 'Roses' is one of the most theatrically ambitious videos in the genre. Its direct parody of Broadway musicals within a hip-hop framework was unprecedented at commercial scale and prefigured later genre-hybridizing videos. The video consolidated the…

The director

Bryan Barber (b. December 20, 1970) is an American music video and motion picture director. He directed his first music video for OutKast in 1998 and became known for narrative-driven, retro-inflected visual scripts. He has won three MTV awards, five BET…