Popscreen: Lupe Fiasco

Lupe Fiasco

“Kick Push”

Dir. Christopher Adams and Hannah McDowell

Skateboarding is cool. It has always been, and will always be—at least until the “Back to the Future” hover-scooters go on sale at Target. So Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick Push,” an ode to the essential motions of the sport, already has the chips stacked in its favor. Fiasco starts the video, as all must, with a shout-out to his homies, but what follows isn’t the standard booty-shaking fare. It’s pleasantly low-key; clips spliced out of skateboarding home videos, wide shots of grungy urban blocks, and throughout it all, Lupe himself dipping about amicably.

Half the pleasure is in seeing the decidedly gawky Fiasco jerking around in front of the camera. Swimming in an oversized hoodie, with a jumbo pair of glasses perched on his nose, he bobs his thin neck to the jazzy beat with a positively adorable sincerity. The cycle gets predictable quickly though—a lone skater rolling past a sinister apartment block, a kick-flip down some stairs, then more head-bobbing.

Nevertheless, Fiasco brings a nice change of pace; he doesn’t swear, he doesn’t hit women—hell, he might not even be packing a gun. The closest thing there is to conflict here is a shot of him rolling past a scowling group of thugs. The only woman featured in the video isn’t a stripper plying her trade, but rather his skateboarding girlfriend, fulfilling a different sort of adolescent fantasy.

Though the video isn’t particularly memorable, it’s at least easily ignorable, a high compliment in the trash-and-candy world of popular music videos.

—Samuel D. G. Jacoby