Of Note:
Meet AG Club

The Film School Dropouts Are Bringing Real Rap Videos Back

Interview: Matthew Trammell
Photography: Caroline Tompkins

One night not too long ago, I got served an ad for AG Club’s “Memphis (Remix)” video on YouTube while watching Dame Dash’s 2018 independent film, Honor Up. There I was, intensely chilled, watching Dame’s epic, out-of-pocket funded and indefensibly violent dramatization of his early life in Harlem, when all of a sudden, A$AP Ferg was on my screen hanging upside down and rapping through a silver grill about the money he still makes off “Shabba.”

The generational crossover was unexpected and satisfying. AG Club is composed of Jody Fontaine, Baby Boy, Manny, Ivan, and a dozen or so other rappers, filmers, and designers from Antioch, in Northern California, all barely cracking their twenties. With one full-length, Halfway Off The Porch, a handful of singles, and two bubbling videos for tracks “Memphis” and “Columbia,” they are floating just under the radar, slowly gaining an audience of fans eager for heroes of their own generation and older peers who saw the early 2010s blog-rap renaissance first hand.

Halfway Off The Porch, released in 2020, lands like Steve Lacy producing a new Pac Div album. The crew’s whole vibe fits snuggly in the lineage of independent California rap: warm, playful, hard when it needs to be, comfy like a pair of house shoes. Their upcoming album, "FUCK YOUR EXPECTATIONS," will be released in two parts this April, and is similarly rich and playful, with highmarks like "UGUDBRU" even recalling Kid Cudi's coolest moments.

While the music is uniquely refreshing, the crew’s visuals are truly of note. AG Club shot the “Memphis” videos as an ode to the rap video’s golden eras, and the overall carefree, star-making joy that defined 2000s made-for-TV music videos. The style they’ve established with their video releases is admirable for its ambition and execution. Their distinctly modern group structure seems like something Dame wishes he cooked up back at DD172—they count a visual team as full-fledged members of the group, and Baby Boy splits songwriting and video directing duties. They care about their clips, and it shows.

“One of the running jokes in our group was that, like, motherfuckers do Airbnb videos,” Jody recounted to me, flanked by his homies on the back porch of the house they all bunk in, when I asked how their approach to video-making all started. “A rapper makes a song, get an Airbnb, and its money and its girls, and they got the bottles, and they’re smoking, and it’s thirty niggas in a room, and that’s the music video.” The crew laughs. “We were like, we don’t wanna do Airbnb videos.”

Featured In This Image: Andersson Bell sweater, Acne Studios cardigan and Acne Studios t-shirt. Top Image: Jody wears Acne Studios cardigan, Acne Studios t-shirt, and Acne Studios trousers. Baby Boy wears Nike sneakers, Andersson Bell sweater, and Bottega Veneta trousers.

Matthew Trammell

AG Club

The fact that you guys have graphic designers and video editors as a part of the group is really cool and new.

Manny: Me and Baby Boy started making music videos in high school for local rappers. He was working on his local grind, and he always had these crazy ideas. We had no money at all.

Jody: It was my birthday. And all we wanted to do for my birthday was shoot a video. We had never shot a video for AG Club before. We linked up and we shot “Caution” in the garage. The way that it came out, we were so geeked on it. We watched it over and over and over. And then that’s when we were like, “We can do this all the time.” As much as we link up and meet up to make music, we could link up and meet up to be shooting.

Tell me about the making of the “Memphis” video.

Jody: We had dropped our album, and “Memphis” was heating up. That’s around when we started fucking with Ivan, and his friends CAJH who are now our [video] production team. We had this whole plan for our roll out, and then we had this friend who worked for Lyrical Lemonade. He wanted to do a Q&A with us, but he wanted us to drop something with [it]. So we said fuck our plans, you want us to drop something? We’ll do this “Memphis” video because that was the song that was heating up the most. We were like alright bet, we need to shoot this video in two weeks. At the time people were making a lot of comparisons. I think somebody had said that we gave them a Pharcyde vibe.

When they said that, did you guys know about the Pharcyde?

Jody: Yeah, we knew “Passing Me By” and we had seen some of the stuff, but we really hadn’t paid too much attention to that. But that was a dope comparison to be made. The “Memphis” sample—“North Memphis niggas, North Memphis niggas”—the whole song is supposed to be an ode to the South, and Memphis, and to hip-hop in general. It’s supposed to give you that feeling that hip-hop’s supposed to give you. That riotous, feel-like-you’re-a-part-of-this energy. We were thinking about Pharcyde, and we were like, why don’t we make this video a shout out to hip-hop. We were watching the Pharcyde “Drop” video, and “Passing Me By,” and “Running,” and we were like, yo these are dope ass videos. Videos were so crazy back then. Videos were fucking stupid. The whole goal was to try to put the AG Club spin on these crazy classic shots. Whether it be the reverse shit or the upside down shit, or the Hot Boyz in the whip shit. Don’t bite completely—don’t scam—let niggas know its homage.

Jody (left) wears Andersson Bell shirt. Baby Boy (right) wears Amiri boots, JW Anderson polo, Bottega Veneta trousers and Daniel W. Fletcher beret.

A guy like Spike Jonze, who did that “Drop” video, started more like what you guys are doing now than most video directors in that time. What was it like watching those old videos and trying to figure out the process of making them, but with the tech you have now?

van: We didn’t have too many resources to do what they did, so we had to get creative. The upside down shot—we went to Home Depot and bought a $30 pole, we had our homies holding it up, and Baby Boy was upside down.

Jody: Literally hanging from it with the backs of our knees.

Manny: We also shot the reverse shots with the song playing in reverse. We really tried on that. With the Pharcyde video, they had a linguist there to match the reverse.

Jody: But Ja barred it!

Manny: Ja barred it. There was some clips in there where we were like, “How’d he do that?!” Because nobody had enough time to practice it.

Baby Boy: It’s cause I had a [Nintendo] DS.

[Everyone laughs].

Wait, say that again?

Baby Boy: I had a DS when I was a kid. And it had an option where you could record your voice and play it backwards. So I used to practice saying things backwards.

[Everyone laughs].

Jody: You never even told us that, bro. That’s fire.

I didn’t even know a DS could do that

Baby Boy: The old ones, the first ones. They don’t do it anymore. On the Switch you can’t do that shit.

In the “Columbia” video, you’re painted as an alien. When did it start to feel like you could actually pull that idea off?

Baby Boy: For me, when I’m writing treatments, it always feels like we can pull it off. But it’s a matter of whether it’s in the budget. For that video, we had to hire a make-up artist, and get locations, and rent things. We had another idea for the video which was expensive as heck.

Where does the background in video production and writing treatments come from? Did any of you guys study film?

Baby Boy: Me and Manny went to high school together. We took a video production class, and we pretty much learned everything you need to know. The basics and then some. Screenplay, writing, we learned how to storyboard, editing, front to back. We learned everything about how to make a video.

That was all in one year?

Baby Boy: For Manny it was three years, for me it was two.

Was there any aspiration to go to college or make films?

Baby Boy: It’s actually a funny story. Me and Manny went to the same community college, and we took a film class. And the class was such bullshit. We thought this was gonna be a big head teaching us the next steps. And it was everything we learned in our first year [high school classes]. We thought, we don’t even have to go. We’ll just get the assignments and turn them in. And we were doing good for a while, we were turning in our projects and getting really good grades. But the teacher hated us cause we never showed up. At the end of the semester we had a final project which was to make a short film. Our teacher literally told us when we turned it in, he didn’t believe that anybody in his class could make something like this. He didn’t believe that we wrote it, he didn’t believe that we edited it. We have the email; he said, “Nobody in my class could make this.” So he failed us. We failed the class. And so we just were like fuck it. We don’t need school to make videos.

Jody (left) wears Acne Studios cardigan, Acne Studios t-shirt and Acne Studios trousers. Baby Boy (right) wears Andersson Bell sweater.

How crazy is that, the dude who’s supposed to be teaching you is accusing you of lying.

Baby Boy: It just shows how good you are as a teacher. He thinks he sucks.

That’s fucked yo. That’s deep.

Baby Boy: It feels good to be where we are in the video world after that. It feels like, fuck you.

I’m blown away by that story. I bet he’s gonna brag about having taught you guys after the fact. Y’all should say his name and blow him up in this interview.

Baby Boy: What’s his name? Olson?

Manny: Yeah, fuck Professor Olson [laughs]. I wrote him an email because we never even went back and got our grade fixed. We should at least get our grade fixed!

Matthew Trammell lives and works in New York City. His writing can be found in The New Yorker, DAZED, The FADER, and more.