Talib Kweli’s New Video Is Incredibly Powerful In Its Silence

Talib Kweli’s newest video for the single “Radio Silence” featuring Amber Coffman and Myka 9, visually mirrors the track’s message in the most artfully accurate way. The visuals for the title track off Kweli’s eighth solo album, Radio Silence (an inclusion in Ambrosia For Heads’ Top 15 albums of 2017), were created by Trapsolutely and provide an ideal juxtaposition of perception versus reality.

Viewers are first introduced to a ballerina in red as she enters a dingy, graffiti-covered warehouse. Before she begins her dance, she covers her mouth with a strip of duct tape. The Brooklyn, New York MC raps alone in a low-lit stairwell or joined by Freestyle Fellowship’s Myka 9 in an alley behind a rundown apartment building. The line, “I feel I’m cursed, so I talk this way / Gotta write what I’m livin’ in graffiti / It’s the hood hieroglyphics / So I’m lookin’ for a wall to spray,” fits perfectly within the imagery.

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The elegant ballerina’s story is told alongside a young man as he strings up a rope on an old tree. With his mouth covered as well, he attaches an American flag to the noose and lets it hang.

The imagery of social justice messages delivered via full wall murals accentuate the point during the transition. Another character enters the dusty warehouse with a boombox to meet several other young people as they bring various pieces of sound equipment and stack in on a table. The video concludes as one man lights the pile which becomes quickly engulfed in flames.

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The video for “Radio Silence” is the latest from the album with the same name. Previously, he dropped “Traveling Light,” featuring Anderson .Paak, and “Heads Up Eyes Open,” with Rick Ross.

Just weeks ago, Talib and Yasiin Bey dropped the bomb that they would be reuniting as Black Star with Madlib’s participation during a concert in Denver.