A$AP Rocky has made it clear that his intentions with TESTING go far beyond the album itself. With an explosion of recent audiovisual projects, he’s working on further developing the provocative conceptual direction he put into TESTING in realms that reach beyond creativity and deep into art’s importance as a platform to explore a particularly trying time in the America’s socio-political climate.

 

With Sundress, last week’s hyper-creative masterpiece that saw Frank Lebon’s bold eye crafting an interpretive storyline over a Tame Impala beat turned Danger Mouse and A$AP Rocky jam, a new gear was set in motion and a new bar raised for the avant-garde influence in experimental hip-hop videos. Now, with the visuals for TESTING’s Gunz N Butter, Rocky takes a similar creatively original route, but uses it to open the discussion on a long list of poignant but unavoidable matters related to current affairs.

 

From consumerism’s cancerous correlation to widespread unoriginality, to comparisons between factory farming and the way children are raised in the modern world; from police violence, to gun laws key marked by an allusion to homegrown terrorist, Dylan Roof, A$AP Rocky takes the boldness in his experimentalist music and brings it to life with no regard for sensitivities. 

 

A timely work of art by a timeless artist.