Kool Keith And MF Doom’s “Super Hero” Video Is A Visual Pop Travesty

Take an eminently GIF-able trip through the characters and masks made legendary by the two rappers.

October 20, 2016

Kool Keith and MF DOOM are two of hip-hop's most beloved elder eccentrics, and "Super Hero" from Keith's new album Feature Magnetic, showcases their still-sharp off-kilter personalities that gave so many modern artists permission to get weird. The track is set in the world of skewed comics where both rappers made so much great work, but the video, premiering today on The FADER, feels like a tribute: it's a hyperactive, vividly colorful series of animated scenes featuring iconography associated with both rappers.

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"When I produced the track I pictured DOOM as a bunch of different Marvel characters," Keith told The FADER over email. "Like two super heroic distinctive rappers with powers." The clip's director Kris Merc added a description of the video's concept: “I wanted to capture something that felt like a visual pop travesty. I wanted it to visually speak to the legacy of the artists, and Afrofuturism mixed with comic book concepts. I’m a fan of the unseen, and I was obsessed with the idea of using DOOM’s mask and the iconography as a centralized point — as if time and space converged around these strange, sometimes magical tableaus and we were witnessing an ascension.”

Feature Magnetic is out now. You can grab it on iTunes, or cop the limited edition dolphin teal vinyl here.

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Kool Keith And MF Doom’s “Super Hero” Video Is A Visual Pop Travesty