Da Bush Babees - We Run Things

JUL 01 1994 · 12:00

Da Bush Babees - We Run Things (1994) Director: Hype Williams Era: Golden Age of Hip-Hop (1994) - East Coast rap ascendancy; debut single from Da Bush Babees' Reprise Records album 'Ambushed', released during the genre's most critically fertile commercial period High. This video occupies a meaningful intersection in hip-hop visual history: an early Hype Williams commission executed in a restrained, community-grounded register that contrasts instructively with his later bombastic style, combined with the cultural significance of Ali Shaheed Muhammad's production credit and Da Bush Babees' underrepresented reggae-rap identity. It is a primary document of a transitional aesthetic moment in both the director's career and the genre's visual evolution. Context: Released in 1994 at the height of East Coast rap's golden age, 'We Run Things (It's Like Dat)' represents a notable intersection of Brooklyn hip-hop, Jamaican dancehall influence, and the Native Tongues intellectual tradition, the single was produced by Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest. Da Bush Babees (Y-Tee, Bae-B-Face Kaos, Mr. Man) brought a distinctive reggae-inflected cadence to the New York rap landscape at a moment when genre hybridity was critically celebrated. Hype Williams' direction grounds the video in communal, park-based Black social space, a visual vocabulary that situates the group within an organic neighborhood culture rather than the ostentatious materialism that would later dominate rap video aesthetics. The warm, high-contrast outdoor palette and rapid crowd-performance editing mirror the frenetic energy described by contemporary reviewers of the 'Ambushed' album. Director notes: Confirmed by IMDb (tt7151888) and Rate Your Music as directed by Hype Williams. The video was produced in 1994 for Da Bush Babees' debut single 'We Run Things (It's Like Dat)' from the album 'Ambushed' on Reprise Records, produced by Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest. Per IMDb synopsis, the video opens with a black-and-white sequence of the group walking through a park before transitioning to a performance before a large swaying crowd. This video represents an early-career Hype Williams commission, contemporaneous with his founding of Big Dog Films (1993), and predates his breakthrough maximalist phase, instead deploying a restrained verité-documentary register consistent with the Native Tongues-adjacent, community-rooted aesthetic of the track's production lineage.