There is something to be said for following through on something. For instance, if you make a song that is a non-stop cacophonous onslaught from beginnng to end, I consider it good follow-through to make a music video that goes just as hard.
Such is the arrangement with "Make 'Em Say Uhh!" by Master P, a song that I find extremely difficult to listen to for many reasons, but one of them is that the main hook of the song is a bunch of people moaning "uhh".
But the video is something else entirely, so today on Music Video Relapse we're watching the accompanying completely insane music video for 1998's "Make 'Em Say Uhh!", directed by Michael Martin.
I'm not a hip-hop expert by any measure, so I trust what various blogs and magazines say when they talk about how important this video was to New Orleans rap, paving the way for the likes of Birdman and Lil Wayne. The video definitely doesn't waste any time in making a first impression - it takes literally six seconds before a gold tank busts onto a basketball court. The video goes on from there, featuring a chaotic scene filled with the No Limit soldiers in No Limit jerseys, a crowd going nuts, cheerleaders, and one large man wearing the number 60 who squats and gyrates in place for literally the entire video. Uhhh!
It's chaos from end to end, and the constant flahes of light and extremely quick cuts turn it up to 11. Each featured rapper delivers their verse on the court and then sometimes in a gold hallway. One of the most memborable visuals in this video, however, is a guy dressed in some sort of monkey costume doing ridiculous dunks throughout the video. He's only in there a few times, but he makes his mark pretty quickly since his slo-mo dunks are accompanied by giant bursts of confetti.
Uhhh!
Although "Make 'Em Say Uhh!" as a song is frequently placed on "worst of" lists, this video is amazing. The gold tank makes absolutely no sense with or without any context, and the lighting and pacing are jarring sometimes tough to watch. But this is a classic hip-hop video by anyone's measure, just from the amount of energy this video has. Uhhh!
The best testament to how ridiculous this video is the fact that Shaq is in it, and it's pretty hard to pick him out unless you know that he's there because of everything that is going on. He's in the crowd at around 1:50. Yes, that's right, he's in the crowd and not on the court. I honestly don't think Shaq could go hard enough to not fit in with the monkey dunk guy.
Uuhhhh!
