Sometimes, when teenagers get bored, they make music videos. And when they make music videos, they usually do them poorly. They follow the same formula: a bunch of solo shots dancing in front of the camera intended to make them look really cool.
It’s not a stretch to say that Kevin Gates’s music video for “Castle,” released Jan. 29, uses this tired formula. The song, which isn’t even on the rapper’s recently released studio album, Islah, spends a lot of bars talking about Gates’s metaphorical kingdom and how anybody who challenges such a power structure will be shot at (a lot).
The video’s plot is straightforward in that there isn’t one. Save an opening scene in which a subservient waiter serves a mimosa that Gates immediately laces with codeine, the rest of the video, which spans four minutes and 16 seconds, consists of Gates dancing and generally doing random things throughout nighttime Brussels. Even the end of the video just kind of fades away.
It does little to complement a hook-friendly, trappy song similarly devoid of any discernible societal implication. It’s literally Gates, wearing a funny hat, doing funny dancing. It’s somewhat fun, though, which provides the bulk of the entertainment value.
The entire thing seems as if Gates and his crew were chilling together one day and thought it would be fun to shoot a music video in a foreign city. Each shot is hastily done; even the picture is low quality. Everything about it is down and dirty, which, at this point in his career, personifies Gates as well.