Snoop Dogg has released his new video "Lavender" (Nightfall Remix), named for the original BADBADNOTGOOD track that Snoop Dogg raps over in the new song. In an interview for Billboard, the rapper explained what led him to that track. He'd started out with a lyric focused on issues of racism and police brutality, he just needed the right track to put under it. "I had never had a song like that, so when I got back to the studio, I started skimming through beats, and that particular beat just seemed on the same page to get me going, so I wrote the whole song (to it)."
The video takes place in a kind of clown-universe, with the biggest of clowns being clown president Ronald Klump. News reports tell of Ronald Klump calling to "deport all doggs." These leads to an eventual confrontation between Snoop and Ronald Klump, in which Snoop pulls a fake gun on the orange clown.
The video also includes clown cops, who shoot an unarmed man (also a clown) in his car. Director Jesse Wellens told Billboard, "I just had been seeing this go on in the world politically, and I actually was a cop for six years in the military, so I can kind of see it from the cop’s point of view too. When I originally wrote the idea of the video, the video of (Philando Castile) getting shot came out online and it was causing riots. We just kind of wanted to bring the clowns out, because it’s clownery -- it’s ridiculous what’s happening."
BADBADNOTGOOD themselves weren't directly involved with the project, and sax player Leland Whitty found out about the project via Instagram, of all places. "I woke up one morning. Alex [Sowinski] had sent me the Instagram video and I was like, 'This is crazy.' Snoop Dogg’s probably one of the first rappers I ever listened to," Whitty recalled proudly. "It’s cool [for Snoop] to just turn something we didn’t have any emotional connection to and [associate it] with something so relevant right now ... It kind of sounds like he’s rapping the way that he would in the ‘90s, and it brings out a lot of things that I haven’t really heard in a lot of his more recent music. So that was really neat, too."
Watch the new video below.