Phaseone's "Sugar" Video: A Break-Up and a Drive Through Chicago

By Diana Benanti Mon., May 23 2011 at 3:25 PM

Categories: Videodrone

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We just can't get enough of our once and future homie Phaseone, who left us earlier this year for Brooklyn. The St. Louis ex-pat premiered a new video last night for a track called "Sugar." "The tune itself is an homage to the '90s Chicago rap sound of Twista and Do or Die that my friends and I grew up listening to," says Phaseone. Like everything that bears his name, it's pretty much excellent.

Some St. Louis folks lent their skill to the project: the film was conceived and directed by filmmaker Ryan Powell and Vadim Gershman, curator of Glitch lit mag/art journal. The song was recorded by Phaseone in St. Louis last summer, but the video itself offers a sweeping look at Chicago from its main arteries to quiet side streets, interspliced with realistic dialogue between the one that got away and the one who is getting away. Gershman and Lea Sorrentino contributed the text, which will ring uncomfortably true to anyone who's lived through the icky post mortem of a failed relationship, shown here in the now-inescapable dissection via text message.