Is Kahlil Joseph One of Today's Most Important Music Video Directors?

If you hadn’t already known, Kahlil Joseph is the mastermind behind many of the most iconic videos and music videos for artists like Kendrick Lamar, FKA twigs, and Flying Lotus. Preferring to stay outside of the limelight, the director and videographer prefers to let his brilliant work speak for itself. He has directed FKA twigs’ “Video Girl,” a few Shabazz Palaces videos, and a fashion film for Kenzo, and also Flying Lotus’ Until the Quiet Comes. The film, which was released in 2012, caught Kendrick Lamar’s attention, who then asked Joseph to create m.A.A.d, the video that played to Kendrick’s performances during his Yeezus tour opening slots. i-D spoke with Joseph about the people he works with and about his vision in his art, and proposed the question of whether or not he is hip-hop’s most important video director. Read an excerpts below and check out the full thing here.

How do you choose the musicians you work with?
Grace. It tends to be that they speak to something inside me and the timing and circumstances allow for a collaboration. It’s not a super deep process, but it often feels like it’s larger than me, so I guess it is.

Your work with Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus provides a greater context to the music by depicting communities. What draws you to these communities?
“Until the Quiet Comes” was a combination of Lotus wanting to do an LA video, but not the LA that people were familiar with, as well as my attraction to the black community and the way black people are photographed and filmed. I shoot communities because I think there’s a lot of richness there and a lot of honesty and a lot of pain. It’s interesting how they deal with that pain, it’s been there for centuries. And it’s not fake pain. They mask it with all these layers to the point where they don’t even know what they’re masking.
The Kendrick video, I’m certain, was a result of me having done the Flying Lotus video, because of its impact and because of where I shot it. But I’m not just interested in the hood, not even close. That’s something I’ve been very cognisant of especially after making the Kendrick piece. Most people have probably only heard of me because of the Kendrick or Lotus videos, which both take place in the hood. It’s not at all a representation of how I work or how I think, it just happened to be the story we both wanted to tell.