Crooked Smile dropped September 18th, 2013, the genre. The video is about a little girl that gets shot by the police during to a drug raid. J Cole in this video is represented as a drug dealer and a father. The start of the video shows the J Cole preparing for his daughters birthday as he is doing this the words on the video says ‘anywhere in America’. An example of the multi-cultural lens is J Cole and the officer in the video showing how people lead 2 completely different lives because of their race but still go through the same troubles, it also it shows the difference between a drug dealer and a policeman’s daily life. At the beginning of the video, there is a clip of J Cole in a police car, with the sound of police sirens; which indicates that he is somehow tied into crime. It then goes to a black screen, and then cuts to a flashback of J Cole washing his face and then looking in the mirror, the shot is then cut to a clip of a white man standing in the mirror, the clips of the two men are followed by each other showing each of them brushing their teeth.
This implies that although people’s race and what their occupation is, they still do the same things a person would do in their day to day life. J Cole looks like he is waiting for someone and the other man is sitting having breakfast with his daughter. There is a scene of the daughter and the man making faces at each other while laughing. The video focus’ on J Cole, showing him looking at drugs he has in his house, also showing him then hiding them, after this, there is a clip of the other as a policeman. Therefore we can guess how different the different their lives are. Now there is a shot of a car pulling up to J Coles house and two older people and a girl getting out of the car, the girl runs up J Cole and hugs him. From this, we can see that that girl is his daughter and it also implies that she doesn’t live with him due to drug crime. However, despite this, the scene shows that his family still loves him a lot.
The next scenes are now night time and close-ups of the four holding sprinklers. After that, the policeman comes in talking. The police look like they are plotting something and we can imply that they are plotting something on the J Coles house as it cuts straight back to the family celebrating the little girls birthday. There are words show in the video saying ‘later that night’ which is showing the outside of J Cole’s house. The police van pulls up here and the police run into the house with guns, therefore the police are raiding J Coles house for drugs. There is a shot of the little girl in bed scared and showing a shot from her pov of her Father being arrested. The shot cuts in as a gun being pointed at the little girl due to the police thinking she is a threat and a gun sound is made. There is then flashbacks of previous shots, showing what the little girl is thinking of just before her death, the J Cole who has been arrested realizes his little girl has been shot and is trying to get to her.
The police officer that has shot her has a look of regret on his face. The song then is cut back in while the other sound is still playing while J Cole is crying and a close up of the officer looking as though he sympathizes with him. There is then a scene of the two daughters of J Cole and the Officer together in school, but they are both in heaven. By this, we can see that the policeman’s daughter also died, but we don’t know how. Then shot the cuts to both of the men upset as J cole’s daughter’s body is carried out. The video ends with the clip it started. The song relates to my book because Octavian nothing is a young black boy living in a white man’s world and J Cole is a black man trying to get by in a white man’s world by selling drugs.
