Alternative hip hop duo Shabazz Palaces are back with a new music video for “Bad Bitch Walking” a track from their latest studio album The Don of Diamond Dreams. This latest video was directed by Amhalise Morgan and shot at four different locations: Toronto, Seattle, Ontario and Brooklyn.
“Bad Bitch Walking” opens up with an excerpt from a poem by Pavana Reddy, which discusses her mother embracing the fact that her daughter has dark skin. This visual tars the group’s Ishmael Butler, the song’s guest feature Stas THEE Boss, model Shernita Anderson and dancer-choreographer Tanisha Scott. Butler and Stas THEE Boss are shown singing the song in an all white room, while Anderson is briefly shown embracing herself and Scott does a brief dance routine. The song is accompanied by a funk bassline, steady beat and smooth vocals that give the song a bit of an eclectic hip hop sound.
“The song is simple and sensual so I decided to focus on tight shots to really have the intimacy take center stage and the focus be the women and the performers,” Morgan stated in a press release. “We are living in such precarious times and beautiful Black imagery is very necessary and needed. At times it feels like we can’t change the violence in this country nor the victims and the perpetrators but what we CAN do is contribute imagery that is beautiful, strong, yet soft NOT brutalized, marginalized, and disposable.”
Butler makes up half of the group alongside Tendai “Baba” Maraire and have been active since 2009. The group released two records simultaneously in 2017, which were paired together as Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines/Quazarz: Born on Gangster Star.
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