Nigeria is making its case as the culture capital of this world’s future. With an exploding cultural scene driven most heavily by fashion, music, photography, and videography, D’Prince and Rema’s new music video, Lavida is the perfect exhibition of every lane. Three-and-a-half minutes of experimental afrobeat West African hip-hop sets the stage for D’Prince to stunt in some designer class and for Rema to split his time dancing across the hood of speeding cars, counting money, and balancing women and machine guns. It’s spectacularly ignorant in every way every good rap video should be. But it’s also much more. 

 

Driven by eye-catching flashes of color – the dyed smoke, the aqua-blue sports car and blimp, the choreographed dancers’ outfits – the video is an ode to the colorful and quickly moving country both Rema and D’Prince call home to. The fashion alone would be enough to make an A$AP Mob video feel tame. Guest spots from every character in the video teem with gold jewelry, spectacular pattern, and jealousy-inducing eyewear. 

 

Altogether, the vision, the fashion, and first and foremost, the music make Lavida an early front runner for video of the year, not only putting us on notice to the exploding talent of D’Prince & Rema who are both on the heels of 2019 project releases, but also continuing to put the world on notice of the immeasurable cultural importance of Nigeria and Afrofuturistic pop culture at large.