Shabazz Palaces - Since C.A.Y.A.

What this video is

Released October 31, 2017, as part of Shabazz Palaces' ambitious dual-album 'Quazarz' project (Sub Pop, July 2017), in which the Seattle experimental hip-hop duo released two complete albums simultaneously — 'Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star' and 'Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines.' The video's radical visual darkness and glitch aesthetic mirror the duo's conceptual framework of Quazarz as a sentient being from…

Why it matters

Represents a landmark artifact of 2010s experimental Black hip-hop visual culture, where directors consciously rejected pop-rap video spectacle in favor of gallery-adjacent, glitch-inflected, near-illegible imagery. The video's extreme darkness (brightness 21.9/255), near-zero saturation, and…

The director

Stephan Gray is a music video director and cinematographer/DP active primarily in the 2010s, credited across 22 directorial music video projects per IMVDb. He operates across directorial, editorial, and camera departments (22 director credits, 13 editorial…