Tim Burton designing the album cover, Danny Elfman collaborating on the arrangements and making a cameo as a drummer, Winona Ryder as the protagonist of the video clip, playing a housewife who lives in the typical American suburb, A$AP Rocky with curlers…
It is enough to put two and two together to know what the New York rapper’s main aesthetic reference is in his new video clip: the suburban and marujo iconographic universe of ‘Edward Scissorhands’.
It is not the only reference, wink or complicit nineties nudge from ‘Punk Rocky’, a song from the album ‘Don’t Be Dumb’. The video begins with credits that evoke the aesthetics of MTV, while Winona wears a t-shirt from the animated series ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’, also linked to the network.
But there is more. The neighbor with a cigar and a ponytail reminds us of the looks of a nineties wrestling fighter or the soap opera star Tony Little and his legendary Gazelle Freestyle. The lineup sequence is modeled on a 90s classic, ‘The Usual Suspects’. And A$AP’s band rehearses in a garage, another icon of the time, associated with punk and grunge bands.
To top it all off, there are also nineties sound references. The interpolation of ‘All the Small Things’ reinforces the allusions to MTV, the pop-punk that dominated its programming in the late nineties and those hooligan video clips that mixed music, humor and suburban adolescent culture, with narratives built on the basis of visual gags, physical humor and absurd situations.
