There’s a title card, but within seconds, the setting is unmistakable:
Magnolia Housing Projects
New Orleans
You see the rows of buildings stretching out toward the horizon, seemingly vacant and endless. A hard cut and suddenly, the frame fills with action: Juvenile in the foreground, perched over a puddle, a sea of Magnolia residents waving their arms behind him, hanging from balconies, poking curious heads out of windows. That’s you with that big-body Benz, ha?
You see Juve shirtless, shimmering with sweat; he’s grimacing in front of convertibles; he’s showing off his gold fronts in jarring close-up; he’s rapping animatedly—skinnier than you expect, all elbows and sharp angles—in front of a mural bearing the projects’ official name, C.J. Peete; he’s dancing around a porch while the family that lives there sits motionless; he’s mugging in a hallway next to Baby and Mannie Fresh; he’s shadowboxing.
The rest of Magnolia pops to life, either in eerily real tracking shots or in static frames that might as well be portraits. Kids jump on cast-off mattresses. Women in church clothes pose soberly—so do EMTs, with arms crossed in front of their ambulance. Magnolians get chased and cuffed and clutched by their fathers. There are roller skaters and pickup basketball games. A man on crutches hobbles down a street lit only by that ambulance’s siren lights; a boy feeds a piece of deli meat to a dog; money is counted and blurs until the bills are indistinguishable.
This is “Ha,” one of the most singularly brilliant rap songs of the 1990s. It’s been interpolated by people who win Pulitzers and bitten by countless young rappers, either in their formative periods or when they fly a little too close to the sun. Its video, directed by Marc Klasfeld, is genuinely stunning—spare but stylized, high art from self-consciously low production budgets, a four-minute blueprint for the rap videos that would come after the massive budgets from the Hype Williams era evaporated. There are no yachts. The whole thing takes place in and around Magnolia, where Klasfeld and his team set up camp for three days. Juve claimed that “all the drug dealers shut down” to accommodate production.
Even today, “Ha” sounds like it’s from the future, except when it sounds like it’s from the lobby of your building. Juve is sly and sarcastic, writing in the second person, ribbing you about child-support payments and switching to Reeboks and finally figuring out how to use your triple-beam. Juve laughs and sneers and, occasionally, commiserates. It’s a writing exercise. It’s also the platonic ideal of a rap song: mean, minimal, funny, foreign. Mannie’s beat is a rattling, electronic taunt, and its coda, which could have easily anchored another hit song, is free and acrobatic and full of bounce.