It’s funny. For a song detailing the circumstances surrounding an ugly breakup between Lil Baby and his former girlfriend/best friend, a surprisingly short amount of time in the “Close Friends” music video is devoted to the two former lovers. In fact, there are several shots of Lil Baby slouching on the balcony of a Parisian apartment, and there are even more shots of him riding around Paris in a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, rapping emphatically. After all, it is a rap video — these lackluster scenes are industry standards at this point, and it doesn’t appear they are going away any time soon. As such, these tropes are to be expected and sufficiently ignored.
On top of this, the video has a few glaring issues, primarily Lil Baby’s acting. It is so robotic and flat-out bizarre that it’s hard not to laugh. The tender opening dinner scene between the Atlanta crooner and his girlfriend (who is Lil Baby’s actual girlfriend) is made absurd by Lil Baby’s writhing and constant motion. The scene portraying an argument in which the woman swipes a video game controller from Baby’s hand is ruined by his inability to feign emotion, instead opting to cease all movement until the camera changes focus. With this in mind, it is wholly possible for viewers to display more emotion while watching the video than Lil Baby does while acting in it.
With “Close Friends,” director DAPS, the man once renowned for his surreal, almost whimsical music videos for the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Migos, seems to have lost his edge. While visually stunning, DAPS videos become stale rather quickly, and the one for “Close Friends” is no exception. Perhaps it is because DAPS has oversaturated the market with his repeated use of the same creative vision for every single one of his videos. It’s hard to say, really. But hey, at least it looks nice.