After releasing his latest narrative album Hawthorne earlier this month, East Coast rapper Motown Priest returned last Friday with a new short film of the same name which features music from the LP. Running 34 minutes, the self-directed clip plays like an extended music video for a handful of the record’s tracks, while the surreal storyline was inspired by the season-six Sopranos story arc in which scenes of Tony’s vibrant dream life are intercut with moments of his family visiting him in the hospital while he lies in a coma after being shot.
Similarly meditative and reflecting the looming dread felt throughout the HBO series it references, Priest’s nocturnal visual climaxes with a drug deal gone bad. “When I constructed the film, I knew I wanted it to have the same themes and similar commentary as the album,” Motown Priest shared of the intertwining works—which also seem to share themes with The Sopranos. “I wanted both to be their own meditation on the downsides of ceaseless desire, identity, and capitalism.”
With both the LP and the film versions of Hawthorne out now, you can stream the former here and watch the latter below.
