XLR8R allegedly published a story I wrote on Baltimore’s finest MC, Labtekwon, in their June/July issue. I haven’t seen the magazine but the story’s available online. One of the things I wanted to (and did) with this piece was focus on Lab’s videos. Despite their limited production values—he shoots and edits most of them himself—they capture what he’s about more fully than the video oeuvre of almost any other contemporary rapper I can think of, mixing and matching Egyptian imagery and old school hip-hop signifiers with gratuitous yet somehow endearing T&A. Ironically, it was catching the most absurdly gratuitous of his videos (for “Uhnnn Huhnnn”) on the late BET Uncut that opened me to his music: it’s hard to imagine why in 2009, but in 2004 the idea of a rapper straddling the Mush Records/Anticon axis dropping a straight up, grimy booty video was very refreshing and almost revolutionary. I’ve been a fan ever since. As I learned when I visited Lab in Baltimore to do the story—and ended up as a PA of sorts, working the audio on an impromptu parking lot shoot—he’s always filming. Here’s an overview of his Youtube-uploaded videos, with some commentary from the man himself. (This Facebook page archives some more recent videos.)

“To me, videos are digital graffiti. It’s not illegal, but I’m drawing pictures to tell a story the same way I would as an MC and the same way I would on the wall with graffiti. …Everybody can do demo tapes now. Everybody can’t do a video. Back in the day, the idea of doing an album was big. Now it’s like whatever. So I’m trying to create a new standard where the multimedia level of it increases at a level that, if you pay attention, you’ll be like, ‘Damn, so and so can’t do that.’ I’m not gonna call Chris Robinson and have him do a video. Just as much as I can write the rhymes and do the beats and the scratches, I can shoot the video, edit it, do the treatment for it.”

“I did Uncut videos for, like, a joke. And they got aired. I watched the show once or twice. I was not a fan of it. But I watched it and said these videos are terrible, this is some of the worst shit I’ve ever seen. To this day, people try to check me for that. My thing was it’s art. The first one was a joke, the second one I was like, ‘I can do it again.’ With “Uhnnn Huhnnn,” literally I wrote that to go with that footage. That was [supposed to be] for a song called ‘Frk Pervert’ from Hustlaz Guide to the Universe. The dude that did the camera didn’t record the audio. It didn’t have no sound. At the time, I had just started doing my own editing and I couldn’t edit without hearing the music track. So I said, ‘Let me write a rhyme to go with this shit.’

It was fun to edit ‘em more than to shoot ‘em. I got to look at ‘em over and over and pick the best ass. I had my cousin Chin Chilla and a female casting director, and we solicited a bunch of women through different channels. We had a casting call where we met and everybody was sitting at a table. It was really an organic basic ass experience. There was more girls there but some of ‘em left because. This one girl there had this huge ass and the other girls were threatening to beat her up because they were jealous. That really happened. She left but I got a video called ‘Ghetto Griot’ and she’s in that.”