After the release of Nas’ eleventh-studio album Nasir in the middle of 2018, he has released an intense, yet powerful music video for standout track “Cops Shot the Kid.” The song features prominent rapper Kanye West and tells the narratives, as the title suggests, of police brutality inserting itself in different communities, this being the black community.
In the music video, the visual starts off with Nas walking alongside a beach at sunset, with clips of police dogs barking, flickering police lights and a car blown up. The visual follows two separate narratives of two black men victim to realistic depictions of police brutality. One man is running away from the cops down an alley, and the other man is getting slammed onto the hood of a police car at a gas station. As the music video continues, neither of the men make it out alive with one body laid dead, covered on the sidewalks, while the other being shot at while running away from law enforcement.
Pitchfork mentions that the visual itself does not feature Kanye West, but it does slip in a cameo from Slick Rick, whose 1988’s “Children’s Story” was sampled on the Nas track.
Check out the new music video below.
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