Kamasi Washington – “Street Fighter Mas” Video
On Friday, the young jazz great Kamasi Washington will release his massive, sweeping double album Heaven And Earth. It is tremendous, and you should absolutely hear it as soon as you get a chance. And today, Washington has shared his new video for “Street Fighter Mas,” the warm and expansive instrumental that he shared a couple of weeks ago.
The “Street Fighter Mas” video comes from the great music-video auteur AG Rojas. In the clip, we see Washington — who, with his robe and beads and spiky rings and cane, looks like an absolute badass — wandering into a mysterious office building. There, he encounters some strange sights and challenges a master.
The videos starts out looking like what might happen if David Lynch directed a samurai movie. Eventually, it turns into what could be called a sports movie, as well as a tribute to a classic early-’90s arcade game. (Of course Washington would pick Blanka.)
Of the video, Rojas says:
I love inhabiting Kamasi’s world, and “Street Fighter Mas” was an opportunity to take a left turn and explore the surreal qualities of that world. When Kamasi told me the background of the song, how Street Fighter was a safe space for him—it took me back to the supermarket down the street from my childhood home where my brother and I would try and get in as many games before our mother was finished shopping. It was a true labor of love for everyone involved, coming from a desire to interpret the cinematic qualities of the track into something equally unpredictable, familiar, absurd and ultimately triumphant.
Here’s the video:
Heaven And Earth is out 6/22 on Young Turks.