Minneapolis-based rapper Brother Ali has released a new music video for “Greatest That Never Lived” a song from his 2019 studio album Secrets & Escapes. This latest video was directed by Jason Goldwatch, who has worked with the likes of Atmosphere, Evidence, Kool Keith, Kid Cudi, Linkin Park and Jay-Z.
“Greatest That Never Lived” is a distorted black and white music video, showing Brother Ali walking around the streets of what appears to be Los Angeles. The video’s glitchy aesthetic fits in well with the experimental hip hop style, with broken up beats and Brother Ali’s signature rapping ability.
The freeform and chopped up style of the single emulates the off the cuff recording process for Secrets & Escapes, which was made over the course of three trips to California, according to a press release. During these times, the religious Brother Ali would find inspiration through his prayers, as the project’s producer Evidence smoked marijuana and chopped-up records on old-school samplers, before running them through a two track compressor so they couldn’t be mixed or re-arranged.
“Being creative is a spiritual journey… You have to have spiritual reasons for doing what you’re doing,” the rapper stated on the 12Geniuses podcast. ” When I say spiritual, I mean not material. And the material also includes status. So if you’re doing what you’re doing to be powerful, wealthy, to have status… you’re not going to be creative and you can just forget it.”
The rapper toured alongside Evidence last year to coincide with the release of Secrets & Escapes. In 2017, he released another album called All The Beauty In This Whole Life.
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