Shabazz Palaces - Chocolate Souffle

What this video is

Released March 25, 2020 — days into the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States — 'Chocolate Souffle' arrived as an accidental artifact of enforced isolation aesthetics. The video's smartphone-centric, self-recorded visual grammar anticipated the explosion of phone-camera content culture that would define 2020's creative output. As a Sub Pop release, it sits within Seattle's legacy indie…

Why it matters

A landmark document in 2020s art-rap video practice: 'Chocolate Souffle' codifies the smartphone-as-cinema-tool aesthetic at a cultural inflection point, demonstrating that maximum conceptual density can be achieved with minimum production infrastructure. It extends Shabazz Palaces' consistent…

The director

David Shields is an internationally published author, essayist, and filmmaker based in Seattle. He wrote, produced, and directed the 2019 documentary 'Lynch: A History' (aka 'Marshawn Lynch: A History'), which premiered at SIFF and was an official IDFA…