LL COOL J - Passion

JUL 01 2024 · 12:00

LL COOL J - Passion (2024) Director: Jake McKenna (Jake the Shooter) Era: Hip-Hop Legacy Revival Era (2024) - Veteran MC comeback period marked by legacy artists returning to core hip-hop aesthetics, nostalgia-driven visuals, and prestige album campaigns after extended hiatuses. High curatorial value as a time-stamped artifact of the 2024 hip-hop legacy revival moment, documenting how a first-generation Def Jam MC navigated a return after an 11-year album absence using nostalgic visual rhetoric. The video's technical fingerprint, warm darkness, animated lyrical overlays, childhood iconography, represents a distinct 2020s evolution of the 'rapper's origin' visual grammar, making it valuable for longitudinal studies of hip-hop music video aesthetics from the 1980s through the present. Context: Released July 12, 2024, 'Passion' served as the second single from LL Cool J's 14th studio album The FORCE (Frequencies of Real Creative Energy), his first album in over eleven years following 2013's Authentic. The video arrives amid a broader 2024 moment of hip-hop legacy reckoning, with veteran MCs reestablishing canonical credibility. The entire album was produced by Q-Tip, and the track samples Herbie Hancock's 'Sun Touch,' anchoring it in jazz-rap tradition. The video's visual language, childhood rooms, rhyme notebooks, lyrical text as living graphic elements, directly mythologizes the MC's origin story, positioning passion for the craft as LL's defining identity and implicitly as a rebuke of commercial trend-chasing. Director notes: Directed under his production company Shooter Co, co-produced with JUNIVIS (Juni.Vis). The video features LL Cool J in his current form alongside child actor portrayals of LL at younger ages (Young Adult, Teen, and Young LL Cool J per IMDB cast listing), visualizing the artist's origin story. Notable visual conceit documented by HotNewHipHop: bars and lyrics literally orbit LL and appear as cartoon speech bubbles while he writes rhymes in a notebook in a childhood-bedroom setting. Production credits per official video description: Executive Producer Aser Santos Jr. (@asersantosjr), Producer Bryan Garcia (@bryansworld_), 1st AD @micha3ljoseph. The RTB x BUA DJ Mona Lisa T-Shirt worn in the video was offered as a limited merchandise tie-in through July 14, 2024.