When I was younger, I watched a lot of music videos. A lot of them were rap videos. My friend Ryan and I would both set VCRs at our own houses to record Rap City, just in case one of our moms hit the power button on the VCR and cancelled the scheduled recording.
A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about the time Shaquille O’Neal rapped with Fu-Schnickens. As you do.
After watching the video ten or eleven times, I remembered two things that connect so many great rap videos from the 1990s.
1) The video should probably be not very good. At all. Almost inexplicably bad in some cases.
2) The key to a rap video is shoving. Whether it’s your turn to rap or not, you should be shoving someone. The more shoving the better.
So here is the video for What’s up Doc (Can We Rock?) by the Fu-Schnickens with Shaquille O’Neal.
This is a treasure trove of rap video shoving. Sometimes they shove even harder when they’re rapping. Maybe it gives them more energy.
It also has:
– Slow motion basketball games that Shaq is not involved in and doesn’t appear to be watching. He’s not there to dunk. He’s got some rhymes to drop.
– Amazing graphics. Sometimes they rap fast, and in two languages, so we are provided with what I’ve called Spiral Closed Captioning™.
– Shaq is wearing what must be a massive Sherlock Holmes-style hat.
So if you are currently editing your debut rap video, make sure it is not very good AND it has lots of shoving.
And make sure your camera is on manual focus. People in rap videos put their hands in front of the camera like they are blocking in beach volleyball.
From mosh pits to monica lewinsky, i feel like there was a lot of shoving going on in the 90s in general.
Good point, the 90s were a shovey time.
I bet if you look back, watching all those Friends reruns didn’t help people deal with their aggression.