The experimental hip-hop trio, clipping. is made up of rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. They recently released their third album There Existed an Addiction to Blood.
It is a horrorcore concept album, which effectively uses horror movie themes to examine racism in America.
The album’s third single, “Blood of the Fang” is built around a sample from Sam Waymon’s score to the 1973 experimental vampire film Ganja & Hess.
Diggs’s lyrics envisions a world where radical black activists of the 1960s and 70s return from the dead. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Angela Davis and Afeni Shakur make up an army of undead superheroes battling against villainous politicians and police officers.
The lyrics recall the United State’s history of racial oppression. “And they thought they could enslave” and “calling for the arrest and murder.”
An accompanying music video features visuals inspired by a picture of The Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton hand-cuffed to a hospital gurney while being treated for a gunshot wound as a result of an October 1967 gun battle with Oakland police.
It also shows provocative imagery of doctors performing open-heart surgery on an AK-47 and Diggs biting into the flesh of the assault rifle. This provides powerful commentary on American gun culture, where guns rights often receive more protection than human rights.
The macabre subject matter of both the song and video awakens viewers and listeners to the real-life horrors that still take place, the addiction to blood that fuels our society’s recurring nightmares.