Lil Uzi Vert Is Stoked About Young Thug and Darkness in the New “Up” Video

Lil Uzi Vert may have driven mainstream emo-rap into its darkest aesthetic recesses, but that doesn’t mean he can stop grinning. Even in the video for “XO Tour Llif3,” a clip that’s set somewhere between a seance and a murder scene, he beams when he mimes “all my friends are dead.” So in he and Young Thug’s Occult-tinged, Twin Peaks-referencing new video for “Up,” which you can watch at the top of the page, the really uneasy scenes only last a minute or so. Thugger curls his lip, prowls around a velvet-draped room, pays no attention to the checkerboard-painted, Black Lodge figures who flank him in a black and white-lined hallway. And then Uzi shows up, dressed in white shorts and a white cardigan, looking like he’s been waiting all week to play a game of tennis. Undead dancers lay hands on him, but he just does a little shimmy towards the ceiling; he pretends to be confused by counting; he’s just altogether thrilled to be hanging out with demons, because demons might want to party too. It’s almost enough to distract a person from Young Thug’s outfits here, but not quite—the highlight is a sequined rainbow zip-up that he dons towards the end.

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