2 live crew cover OK, so the plot of this video, released about a month ago on June 3, goes something like this: a young Jamaican boy, who has a full beard and might actually be a midget or a drwarf, lives in a tin-roofed shack with a group of chickens, goats, a white rabbit and four supermodel dancehall queens, and oh, they also keep a three-legged bulldog in the yard. For fun, this modern family shoots their crossbow at a junked refrigerator, works out with cinder blocks, stands around looking very fashionable and blase, and before long they all say fuck it and start doing crazy dancehall moves in the living room. At this point, you are probably wondering why the lead image here is the cover of 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. Well, I’m getting to that, and it’s not just because I’m a huge fan of Luther Campbell, a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, or at least we could still call him that before the lawsuit: Georgge Luucas may you burn in hell.

So anyway, a white police officer with a funny French policeman’s hat appears – hello, wtf, is this Tahiti or something? why are there French police in Jamaica? So however that works out, the cop is driving some very standard looking SUV like a Ford Explorer, so obviously the props budget was maxed out by this point, but at least they were shooting on one of those super prosumer cameras like the Canon 5D, Sony XD, and so on that gives super image quality and really plays up the rich funkiness of the tropical color scheme.

The Frenchified cop is there for the boy, who sits in a chair as the cop bows down and places the 2 Live Crew album at his feet. We really have no idea what’s going on at this point, but the bearded boy gets into the cop’s SUV with his four supermodel dancehall queen moms, and then they all drive straight to the beach, where a rich Jamaican accountant in an expensive dark suit and glasses is waiting for them. This motley entourage then walks onto the beach and stand together like they are posing for a group photo, and in front of them is a perfect recreation of the 2 Live Crew album cover. Now this is what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek might call a radical moment of displacement, where we wonder where a Swedish band laying down light pop dance tracks like the one we’re listening to gets the moral right to pay this kind of homage to the African-American pioneers of the sex rhyme who are essentially the Larry Flynts of rap music. But then we realize that having this album cover is a dream come true for someone – the bearded boy, who didnt even know he had this dream? the rich Jamaican accountant? the cop? No, the dream actually belongs to the three white-boy members of Miike Snow (whom you can read more about in this unsigned blog post – hey guys, who wrote this?), and of course every white boy in Amerisweden born in the 1970s harbored a forbidden dream of conjuring this album cover to life like some bootylicious Frankenstein. I sure as hell did.

We have of course reached the climax of the video, and for the dénouement, everybody starts dancing on the beach with the addition of trashy, electroclash-style special effects which are like the Aftereffects version of scratching light sabers onto 8mm home movies. All told, this is a pretty awesome video, but still a little less awesomely weird than Eric Wareheim’s videos for the Major Lazer songs Pon De Floor and Keep it Goin Louder. As for Miike Snow’s song “Rabbit”, it’s not as good as Double Up by South Rakkas Crew featuring KillaQueenz and Lady Chan, but it’s pretty solid and if I walked into a club and girls were dancing to it, I’d probably dance to it too.

Here is the Miike Snow “The Rabbit” video:

And the 2 Live Crew never bothered with artsy pretext, because they just made videos like this: