L.A Story

"I stab it like a true no good nigga should
I do it the way a down OG nigga would"

Thus rapped Eazy-E back in '93.

I was in Los Angeles last week shooting the video for Little Boots' debut single 'New In Town' with two OGs of the production world: director Jake Nava and his producer Ben Cooper. Here they are in the parking lot of the Debbie Reynolds dance rehearsal studio throwing up signs like a Crip:


The concept behind the video was to create a choreographed three act musical about the underbelly of downtown L.A - imagine 'West Side Story', but with hobos and gangbangers. Raw, ventral, silly.

Little Boots had a pretty hot whip:


Here she is repping Central City East:


The derelict dance ensemble took good care of her:


Phlex choreographed it, hot off a Britney Spears tour:


We were staying at the Downtown Standard. This is the view from the roof top bar:


Walk a block from the hotel and you hit 'the nickel' (5th street); continue South East for a few minutes and you'll start to notice a change in the habitat; the discoloured tents, the coalescence of cardboard walls, forming a warren of prefabricated homes, the rubbish, the carts, the wheelchairs, the crutches, the liquor stores, the mumblers and ranters riven by schizophrenia, the nappy hair, the sodden laughter, the cracky walks, the disenfranchised, bloodshot lives. This continues for block after block - a favela in the heart of L.A. I'd always known about Skid Row, but somehow I'd developed a romantic, Disney-fied vision of it, refracted through the prism of movies, and not dissimiliar to the video we were making. To see it in reality blew my mind. Here the bums don't get up and start dancing. They stay down.

A day off then we're off to Havana.