Bam Bam in a Blonde Wig

The best moment in the The Chairman’s Intent video is when Action Bronson—wearing a ridiculous floor-length blonde wig, somehow fully committed—executes a kung-fu move with the conviction of a man who has been rehearsing this in his kitchen for months. Rik Cordero directed it, Harry Fraud produced the track, and together they made something that sits in the video-of-the-year conversation without any apparent effort to get there.

Bronson is one of the only rappers working now that I actually follow with sustained attention, and I think it’s because he seems constitutionally incapable of making the expected choice. The rest of the field has flattened into an undifferentiated blur of artists with "Lil" in their names and a sound I can’t distinguish after thirty seconds. Bronson sounds like he’s been eating well, watching old kung-fu films, and reading things that have nothing to do with the music industry. Which is, frankly, the correct approach.

Blue Chips 7000, his album from that summer, had Harry Fraud again as executive producer—the Blue Chips series has always been Bronson at his most comfortable, sprawling and food-obsessed and cinematically oversized. The record delivered on every one of those expectations. But the video is what I keep returning to. The wig, the kicks, the absolute seriousness of the performance. It’s funny and it’s good and sometimes those turn out to be the same thing.