Jonathan Snipes, Daveed Diggs, & Signor Benedick The Moor - “12:00am” (Official Video)

L.A. trio clipping.’s sort-of-self-titled LP was one of my favorite albums of last year, an experimental noise-rap opus that didn’t really deconstruct hip-hop tropes so much as it embodied and celebrated them while gleefully fucking with form. Filmmaker Carlos Lopez Estrada has directed four music videos for the group, and each of them is an inventive, memorable, and weirdly unsettling experience — which, appropriately enough, is also how listening to clipping.’s music could be described. Now, two-thirds of clipping., composer Jonathan Snipes and rapper Daveed Diggs, have once again teamed up with Estrada and previous clipping. collaborator Christian McLaurin IX (aka Signor Benedick The Moor) for a new one-off song and video. The music was made specifically to accompany the visuals, which Estrada reportedly originally shot two years ago. The whole thing is one elaborate, extremely technically impressive set piece, constructed to look like one continuous take following a man on a hellish climb through the belly of the city, exposing layer after layer of urban life like geological strata as he goes. The production follows suit, shifting in tone as he climbs, and Diggs and Benedick accompany it with some paranoid, apocalyptic double-time verses about the state of modern society, also briefly interpolating Curtis Mayfield’s immortal “Pusherman.”