In a new Queen City Nerve exclusive, local rapper Cuzo Key is premiering the new visuals for “1 For Cuz,” the second single off his NIONEK 2 album, which dropped in December. Cuzo went low-key with the video, hanging and cruising the city by himself, hitting spots like the Common Market in Plaza Midwood and Seigle Avenue in the Belmont neighborhood.
Key, whose real name is Kenion Sherrill, said he wrote the song to confront a slew of dark feelings surrounding the incarceration of his brother, the deaths of multiple cousins and a bad breakup. He and a cousin were hanging in Charlotte on a recent night and the mood matched up with the song, so they decided to shoot the video.
“It was a random-ass Tuesday night and me and my cousin was drinking and I just had an idea to shoot a video,” he says. “We did it on the fly. I did aim to get a vibe of how I felt when I made the record: hurt, but I’m still living and moving forward.”
The track, produced by N.A.P., follows the style Cuzo Key has become popular for — a laid-back, beat-riding boom-bap rhythm that in this case perfectly fits the stripped-down and dark visuals. The video was shot by NoNeed4Wishes.
Check out the rest of NIONEK 2 here, or watch the video for Cuzo Key’s first single off the album, “My Bucket,” which premiered last March. Find Cuzo Key on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud.
This work by Queen City Nerve is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
