Music Video
The music video for "Hit 'Em Up" was filmed in a warehouse off Slauson Avenue near Fox Hills Mall in Los Angeles in May 1996. It was filmed by the production company Look Hear Productions. Shakur raps in a white room with The Outlawz, as well as in purple-caged room and a black room with bullet holes in the background. TV monitors in the background show clips of Shakur, Puffy, and Biggie Smalls, and even clips from the video "Made Niggaz." The video featured actors who were recalled from their prior roles in the music video for "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted" to impersonate some of those who were attacked in "Hit 'Em Up." This included Biggie, whose stand-in stares dully into the camera and sports a Kangol and jacket, similar to one Biggie would wear. During the moments where Shakur raps about his claimed affair with Evans, Biggie crouches near the camera while Shakur yells in his face. Puffy is also impersonated, appearing with a high-top fade and leaning towards the camera, lowering and raising his sunglasses.
During the shooting of the video, Shakur was engaged in an argument with someone, who was heard telling him "You'll get shot." His armed bodyguard ensured that he had nothing to worry about. Shakur had also broken up a fight his friend Muta had gotten into during the filming, and fired a production assistant on set. The assistant was answering Shakur's pager and returning his personal calls without his consent. Some of those calls were to women who became either confused or angry that a female assistant was answering Shakur's calls. The assistant had even mistakenly lost the pager, but by the time she found it Shakur had grown wary of her, so he fired her.
Like the song, the video for "Hit 'Em Up" has also been called "infamous". It surpassed the song and video for "New York, New York" in popularity, which was a pro-West Coast track by Tha Dogg Pound whose video featured the members crushing buildings in Manhattan. The music video for "Hit 'Em Up" can be found on Tupac: Live at the House of Blues DVD.
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Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower yet, oh faintly gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
“Woe weeps out her division when she sings.”
Droop herbs and flowers;
Fall grief in showers;
“Our beauties are not ours”:
Oh, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is, now, a withered daffodil.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)