LL COOL J — Around The Way Girl

JUL 01 1990 · 12:00

LL COOL J — Around The Way Girl (1990) Director: Paris Barclay Era: Golden Age of Hip-Hop (1990) - Peak of East Coast rap's mainstream crossover, coinciding with LL Cool J's fourth album cycle and hip-hop's conquest of MTV primetime High curatorial value as a confirmed 1990 artifact at the intersection of hip-hop's commercial breakthrough and its visual culture's maturation. The video is a primary source document for fly girl aesthetics, early Def Jam visual identity, and Paris Barclay's formative music video career. Its meta-fictional casting-call structure is a formally inventive device that rewards close textual analysis. The quantitative fingerprint — 89 cuts, 3.19s avg shot, dark/warm mood — provides measurable evidence of the fast-cut, warm-toned street-realist grammar that defined early-90s hip-hop video production. Context: Released in 1990 as the third single from 'Mama Said Knock You Out,' 'Around the Way Girl' arrived at the precise moment hip-hop was consolidating its hold on mainstream American pop culture. The song reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 — LL Cool J's first top-10 single — and #5 on the R&B chart, signaling a crossover that was reshaping MTV's programming calculus. The video's central argument — that authentic Black working-class womanhood is more desirable than aspirational or assimilated femininity — was a culturally resonant statement during a period when Black identity politics were sharpening in American public life. The fly girl aesthetic celebrated in the video (bamboo earrings, nameplate jewelry, door-knockers) became one of the defining visual vernaculars of early-90s hip-hop, simultaneously a fashion movement and a political stance. The song samples Mary Jane Girls' 'All Night Long' and Keni Burke's 'Risin' to the Top,' embedding it within a continuum of Black popular music that the video's street-realist visual language reinforces. Director notes: Barclay directed this video as part of a sustained creative partnership with LL Cool J that produced eight total videos, including the MTV and Billboard Award-winning 'Mama Said Knock You Out.' The video employs a meta-fictional narrative in which LL Cool J holds a casting call seeking a female model, rejects the results, and takes to New York City streets to find an authentic 'around the way girl,' a structural conceit that mirrors the song's lyrical thesis of preferring working-class Black femininity over polished industry ideals. The warm, dark visual palette and fast cutting pace (89 scene changes over 283s; avg shot 3.19s) reflect Barclay's grounding in both advertising craft and street-level authenticity. The video was produced through Black & White Television, Barclay's production company co-founded with Joel Hinman of Scorched Earth Productions.