A$AP Rocky and Dexter Navy: Kids Turned Out Fine Music Video

Dexter Navy and A$AP Rocky introduced their first brainchild with the LSD music video back in 2015, and they’ve been serving us trippy worlds of engrossing scenes and impossible camera angles ever since. Appropriately enough for their aesthetic (and drug of choice), the new joint, Kids Turned out Fine, opens with Rakim ingesting a piece of Testing-branded paper laced with hallucinogens that bends the fabric of time and physics, ushering us into yet another beautifully crafted Rocky and Navy world.

That ingestion is some of the last action in the video until the ending film collage in which jarring, industrial Testing shots mix seamlessly with a sweet and dreamy love story. Because motion is limited to the camera movements of cinematographer Chris Ripley and the special effects of Mathematic, the set design and costuming need to catch the eye and keep the viewer’s attention with details that carry the narrative along- a feat executed to perfection thanks to Miranda Lorenz’s production design.

The scenes themselves are intimate, unique, and as realistic as they are surreal. There’s hardly enough of a difference in setting or lighting between these vignettes of youthful exploration and the scenes with A$AP himself. This minimal amount of juxtaposition in shots paired with the effortless transitions suggests to the viewer that these youngins experiencing life exist in the same reality and timeline as A$AP and his acid-tripping-picnic-having afternoon. This releases some of the tension between the still figures in the scenes and helps convey the ultimate message- that despite the harshness of the world, the kids turned out just fine.

It’s the line between familiarity and disbelief that Dexter and Rakim love to play with that makes for quality videos every time they link. Enter their visually discordant, oddly comforting world here: