“Ha” did this by making extensive cosmetic revisions to his first (indie) video, “Solja Rag”, while also furnishing it with a more complete suite of concrete cultural symbols: the projects, folks in their own houses, neighborhood cops, kids playing in the street, etc. Many of the shots of Juvenile himself are virtually the same, translated to better film stock and more formal framing (e.g., standing in the sunroof of a five-year-old Mercedes exchanged for posse poses on the hood of a Ferrari).

The slicker presentation does more justice to Juve’s mugging, in its preternaturally grotesque sloppiness, which despite its fundamental supposition of wildness is clearly the product of deliberate cultivation. The lo-fi video created some dissonance: a kind of confusion between the almost comical exaggeration of his menace with the quite explicitly comical low-production silliness in many late-80s and early-90s rap videos. The slicker version benefits from the neatness of its filming and the decision to use his actual wardrobe. It’s also helpful in this sense that the bling is restricted to cars, which are interspersed amid the images of hood verité, like so many scattered hype photos for an issue of Vibe, rather than literal components of the story.

But, as smartly constructed as it is, and satisfying visually, the video is ultimately a failure in terms of standing in as a representative — or counterpoint — to the song. The track is an unusually austere affair by Mannie Fresh, who until this point was known for doing much more rambunctious work for Juvenile’s old d-boy band, The Hot Boys, among others. It’s gridded with his characteristically precise drum programming, but tailored more carefully with contrasting layers — particularly the reverberating synth tone punctuating the end of each bar — which assert the thick, heavily-laden flavor of South casually and emphatically. Juvenile’s perversely rhythmic drawl fits snugly into this strict pattern, and the tightness of the combination works as a kind of affirmation of the reliability of his account. The round, slurred delivery is surface-level guarantee: this is the vulgate, the colloquial; and the coherence and confidence of its patterning makes it compelling. Which combines to make the song seem concrete and believable.

The verité aspect is clearly what the director, Marc Klasfeld, was after with the video. In fact, upon considering this it’s hard to be very sympathetic with the complete lack of subtlety. The approach is right: photograph Juvenile in his right place, the right context. But it backfires — the “artistic” photography is superficial and ultimately irrelevant, and the sundry police reenactments and daily-life sequences tend to make Juvenile’s oversize persona seem crazily irregular.¹ That’s the point of the persona, of course, but set against the precious, fundamentally outsider’s view of the hood, it undercuts the centrality and, ultimately, the authority of Juvenile’s part, which the song itself depends upon.

As ephemera, the video for “Ha” has less complicated attractions. It was an interesting historical moment in rap, the start of an era, and many of the key components are here — Juvenile’s verse is typically Southern in its fresh wordplay and visceral glottals; there’s something at once perfectly precise and utterly predictable about “you done switched from Nike to Reebok, ha?” The original Cash Money crowd: bafflingly persistent Birdman, Mannie Fresh — looking less manicured. And a lucid-looking Lil Wayne ducks in at 3:32.

1. A similar thing happens in Klasfeld’s video for Scarface, “My Block,” (2002) though Face benefits from taking a voice-over role — there the danger comes not from an undercutting of his authority, but more directly from affected staging. This is also notable entry in the psuedo-one shot video canon, along with Xzibit’s “What U See Is What U Get” (1998) and its copycat “Santana’s Town,” (2003) by Juelz Santana.