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Kendrick Lamar And Company Have A Cinematic Field Day In 'King's Dead' Video

If the whole world's a jungle, Kendrick Lamar and company have a penchant for continuously scaling its upper heights.

In the second look from the soundtrack to Black Panther, Lamar is joined in the video for "King's Dead" by Jay Rock and Future in a kaleidoscope of scenes — from palm-tree dwellers to stock brokers gone wild. This time, frequent collaborator Dave Free and the Little Homies, who have a history of creating cinematic videos with another frequent collaborator, Dave Myers, split directing credits with Jack Begert.

The video comes amid legal allegations made this week by British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor over another Black Panther-related video — "All The Stars," the first released from Lamar and Anthony "Top Dawg" Tiffith's Black Panther: The Album — which she says appropriated her visual style without permission. Unlike that previous video, with Lamar and SZA immersed in those Afrofuturistic settings, this one takes a drastic departure from the upcoming film's aesthetic. The Little Homies have doubled back to the real world, with a visual that finds them, almost literally, on top of it.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Rodney Carmichael is NPR Music's hip-hop staff writer. An Atlanta-bred cultural critic, he helped document the city's rise as rap's reigning capital for a decade while serving on staff as music editor, culture writer and senior writer for the defunct alt-weekly Creative Loafing.