South Park Couldn’t Have Written This Peace Treaty

There’s a South Park episode—"Krazy Kripples," season seven—where Jimmy and Timmy discover the Crips and decide, with complete sincerity, that they’ve finally found their people. Two kids in wheelchairs, perpetually underestimated, suddenly part of something. Then the Bloods show up and half the crew gets shot, and the whole thing collapses into a failed gymnasium peace summit that goes exactly as badly as you’d expect. The joke works because the resolution seems so nakedly impossible: two factions with that much history don’t bury it because someone rented a room. And then Blueface went and did it with a music video.

Blueface—born Johnathan Porter, 22, a former high school quarterback from Los Angeles who was months away from a college football scholarship when rap intervened—broke through with "Thotiana" in 2018. The track is exactly what it sounds like: a strip club anthem engineered for maximum speaker resonance, the kind of song that spreads through a city on pure physics before anyone’s thought to write about it. Drake co-signed it. Ice Cube co-signed it. An unofficial Nicki Minaj remix materialized. By early 2019 the thing had cleared 50 million Spotify streams and Blueface was the most-hyped rapper of a year that had barely started.

For the "Thotiana Remix," he brought in Cardi B—then fresh off two Grammy wins—and YG, the Bompton rapper and self-declared Blood, and let director Cole Bennett do what he does best. Bennett has been quietly building one of rap’s most distinctive visual catalogs through his Lyrical Lemonade channel, and here he frames the whole video around a single image: members of the Bloods and the Crips sharing the same frame, the same space, doing the same joyful and slightly ridiculous dance moves. Cardi performs in a Bloods-red cowgirl outfit that may or may not be deliberate costuming commentary.

Red and blue. Not at war. Jimmy and Timmy tried a speech and a lot of goodwill. Blueface tried a banger. I’ll take it.