Shabazz Palaces - Goat Me (feat. Cobra Coil)

JUL 01 2024 · 12:00

Shabazz Palaces - Goat Me (feat. Cobra Coil) (2024) Era: Afrofuturist Avant-Garde Hip-Hop (2024) - Sub Pop-era experimental rap visual culture; single-shot immersive video accompanying Shabazz Palaces' mini-album Exotic Birds of Prey, released March 29, 2024 High curatorial value as an extreme outlier in quantitative music video data: 0 scene changes, brightness of 12.77/255 (among the darkest videos in any corpus), and a single 210.7-second shot mark this as an archival specimen of radical anti-conventional video form. Documents the 2024 moment of Shabazz Palaces' sustained Afrofuturist project and the broader trend of avant-garde rap artists using the official video format as a platform for durational visual art rather than promotional content. Context: Released March 29, 2024, 'Goat Me (feat. Cobra Coil)' is track four on Exotic Birds of Prey, Shabazz Palaces' seven-song mini-album on Sub Pop, the second such release within five months following Robed in Rareness (October 2023). Shabazz Palaces is masterminded by Ishmael Butler (b. 1969, Seattle), Grammy-winning rapper formerly of Digable Planets, operating under the alias Palaceer Lazaro. The project is affiliated with the Black Constellation, a Seattle-based Afrofuturist collective spanning music, visual art, and fashion. The video's extreme austerity, single uncut take, near-total darkness, minimal motion, extends the group's long-running rejection of commercial visual norms, treating the music video as durational art object rather than promotional spectacle. Director notes: Multiple searches of press releases (Sub Pop, Ghettoblaster Magazine), Bandcamp, Apple Music, and music journalism sources returned no credited director for this video. All sources describe the video's aesthetic as 'a darkly aquatic dive' but provide no filmmaker attribution. Director credit cannot be confirmed or estimated from available sources.