I remember watching “Felony” for the first time last year and nearly gasping out loud when Dean Blunt suddenly looked up and sang straight to the camera. It’s not like he was camera-shy before (at all), nor is eye contact in a music video unexpected (at all), but within the closely guarded smoke-and-mirrors world of Hype Williams it felt unprecedented, a new dimension of engagement that was plainly open but more inscrutable, intensely private art copy/pasted onto the raised public platform — an unexpectedly amorphous context, with less smoke but bigger mirrors.
Since then there have been quite a few direct encounters with Blunt, and today we get a new clip: “SON freestyle.” As C pointed out with the last one, “SON” is “flagrantly not freestyle-to-video,” though maybe it’s referring to a looser presentation of a finished (Black Metal) product? With “BLOW,” the whole track was definitely pitch-shift tweaked, calling the finality of the song into question even as it produced a bodily chill. This one is [1080 HD] clean and clear, the contents of Blunt’s pockets laid out on the table across from us, but who knows, maybe this one’s jacked too, a two-second loop of a larger song? Questions like these always immediately come to mind and then seem like inane defense mechanisms; to get at the richness of this stuff, you have to look past the potential for trolling and take what’s put in front of you, let it seesaw through the mind, something funny, sad, weird, and raw, still so confusing but in no small way potent.
• Dean Blunt: https://www.youtube.com/user/pollyjacobsen