The rapper has released a new music video ahead of forthcoming album ‘God’s Country’
Rapper Kanye West has released a music video directed by artist Arthur Jafa. Titled Wash Us In The Blood (2020), the track is taken from the rapper’s forthcoming record God’s Country.
The video – echoing Jafa’s film Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) – features mobile footage of police officers assaulting protesters, video game scenes, COVID-19 patients hyperventilating in hospital wards, clips of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery (both killed this year in racially-motivated violence), the words ‘BLACK DEATH’, and radiant solar flares.
The video was unveiled as part of the rapper’s #WESTDAYEVER series, a rollout which sheds light on the musician’s current projects. Jafa revealed that he had been ‘really busy’ working with West during a talk with designer Michèle Lamy earlier this year.
Last weekend, museums around the world co-streamed Jafa’s Love Is The Message. The film – an ode to a century of Black American triumphs, and violence meted out by the police – is soundtracked by West’s gospel-inflected Ultralight Beam (2016).
Discussing Jafa’s Love Is The Message last week, and the film’s powerful but conflicted sense of pathos, ArtReview’s Oliver Basciano wrote: ‘there is no hierarchy to the empathy with which the artist treats the individual images: celebrity, historical, family or poor, the same structural racism abounds’.
