T.I.
“What You Know”
Dir. Chris Robinson


T.I. has done something unprecedented: he made a movie-tie-in music video that doesn’t suck. Every other rapper who decides to promote a movie with a video seems to believe that “thou shalt splice together a lame performance scene with random clips from thy film” is the lost eleventh commandment, but not the King of the South.

T.I actually crafts a plot around the movie he stars in. He jets to L.A., rolls to the spot, gets him-self looking good, and goes to his own movie premiere where a packed house enjoys “ATL,” a tale of youth and dreams set in, you guessed it, the ATL.

It’s a not exactly a new kind of video for T.I., but it is a better one, glitzier and funnier than the clips for his previous hits “Rubber Band Man” and “Bring ‘Em Out.” Handheld cameras and dour-faced club jumpers have been replaced by white suits and rims that glint in the L.A. sunlight. As is appropriate for a video that is selling a movie, there’s a lot of interesting and un-explained stuff going on: T.I. plays an intense game of chess, a weightlifting model hangs around, and plenty of women tool around on roller skates. The pinnacle of the video arrives in the form of a masked T.I. brandishing a Louis Vuitton man-purse.

Also, the song is terrific. The rhymes edge from laid back into boring at times, but his condescending tone turns “But you’s a scary dude / Believed by very few” from good to “Oh, shit!” And the beat is downright epic. DJ Toomp delivers the marching strings and gut-rumbling bass synth to produce the kind of track you’ve always wanted to hear play when you walk into rooms. Fitting that such a brazenly cinematic song should be used to sell a movie.



-Richard S. Beck