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Artist Behind "City of God's Son" Reveals Project Secrets

Gaining steam with a unique "audio film," which includes clips from bold names like Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z, Nas and Samuel L. Jackson, SOHH spoke with producer Kenzo Digital to find out how he crafted City of God's Son.

Kenzo told SOHH the stale state of hip-hop inspired him to be innovative.

"This concept is to explore the practice of sampling as an artist's medium, recontextualizing things to make them new outside of their intended use. It's also my response to how boring and unoriginal hip-hop culture has become, and this is my attempt at reinjecting some form of mystery and intrigue into these characters that have been overexposed and run into the ground with reality TV, video blogs, and our society's obsession with celebrity culture."

"Hip-hop has a long tradition of story telling, and I wanted to use an all star cast of who I felt the best story tellers in hip hop were (who also happen to be my favorite rappers). Those kind of story/narrative based songs have kind of been lost in the new commercial music format." (SOHH)

The creator's film track record has gained him some critical acclaim in the past.

Kenzo Digital is a video artist and director based in New York. He has had films in the Tribeca Film Festival and Mill Valley Film Festival and was a nominee for the Rockefeller Film Fellowship. All music in City of God's Son was produced by Kenzo. (City of God's Son)

His latest project fuses rap with Hollywood by stringing together clips of famous rappers and actors to create a complete story.

City of God's Son is an experimental hip-hop opera starring Nas, Jay-Z, Ghostface, Biggie Smalls, Raekwon, Samuel L. Jackson, Delroy Lindo and Laurence Fishburne. It is a crime drama/coming of age tale of three fictitioius characters growing up in a crime ridden city in a jungle. (Huffington Post)

Not stopping here, Kenzo is aiming to extend his craft.

"The music is just an appetizer, if you can follow me from the trailer to the music, then I'm asking you to follow me from the music to a whole new form of cinematic immersion that no one has ever seen before." (SOHH)

Source: sohh

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