Kanye West & Jay-Z’s ‘Otis’ Video Premieres — Watch
Jay-Z and Kanye West's highly anticipated visual for their 'Watch the Throne' single 'Otis' premiered on MTV at 8:56PM EST today (Aug. 11).
While the 'Watch the Throne' album' featured ornate gold cover art designed by Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci, and an equally decadent recording budget, acclaimed director Spike Jonze's vision for 'Otis' skews dusty over flossy. Although it does feature a luxury car, the clip takes a different approach to swag, opting to destroy a Maybach rather than show off its curves.
In typical Jonze fashion, the video surprises in its simplicity, largely depicting Kanye and Jay jumping on one another in front of a painted American flag backdrop, and tooling the mangled Maybach around an empty shipping yard, with some low rent fireworks.
The video begins with Kanye and Jay approaching the black Maybach -- which typically costs between $300K-400K -- brandishing power tools. After a team of men in white suits goes to work on the luxury car, cutting the doors off and chopping the body down until it resembles something out of 'Death Race,' Jay and Kanye hop in and take it for a spin, doing doughnuts around the abandoned lot with four models crammed in the back.
At some point comedian Aziz Ansari, clad in a suit, drops in for a moment and Jay and Kanye do some more rapping into the camera and the the video abruptly ends, with flyover text announcing that the wrecked car will be offered up for auction, with the proceeds going towards the East African drought disaster.
While it appears that 'Otis' was a lot of fun to shoot -- Jay can't stop grinning -- watching the middle-aged millionaires behave more like Odd Future than two of America's foremost entertainers leads one to sort of just wish they'd leave the kid stuff to the kids.
Jay-Z and Kanye West's 'Watch the Throne' was released on iTunes on Aug. 8, and will hit Best Buy shelves on Aug. 12.
Watch Jay-Z and Kanye West's 'Otis'