Jhené Aiko has dropped two alternate music videos for her song "Never Call Me."
The song details the aftermath of a troublesome relationship with a partner. In each set of visuals, Aiko paints the picture of a woman who's chosen to move on from a situation that she now realizes she was too good for in the first place.
The "Slauson Hills" edition features imagery of Aiko in LA, with old school VHS-tape-looking clips spliced in between glittering, high definition shots of the singer laughing, dancing, and chilling with people that represent the everyday characters in her life. There's even cameos from rappers Nipsey Hussle, Dom Kennedy, and others.
Aiko told NPR, "I wrote this at the height of a very public breakup, so I was feeling a way, for sure. And I’d just taken some mushrooms, so it was like an exaggerated feeling." She went on to explain that the song's feature from Kurupt, who became like an uncle to her while touring together on Snoop Dogg's The High Road Tour, is reminiscent of the real-life conversation they had regarding outsider opinions of the break-up.
The other version of the "Never Call Me" video takes the more symbolic route, and sees Aiko portrayed as the Japanese Shinto goddess of creation and death, Izanami no mikoto. In this version, Aiko acts out a funeral ceremony, which she explained to Refinery29 as being for her ex's ego. "The funeral is for a man I knew personally. A man who lost his way," she explained. "This funeral is the funeral for his ego. In this visual, I portray the goddess of creation and death, coming to collect his poor spirit and set it free," Aiko said.
The two videos don't share much in common visually, aside from that they both feature the singer herself, but the message that comes through is the same. Each video signifies moving on, and a shift from one stage of life to the next. Aiko explained that her reasoning behind making two videos for "Never Call Me" was pretty simple. "I just love this song. I have a lot of different layers to my personality and I love getting to express those layers through my visuals."
Aiko's second studio album Tripdropped back in September of 2017.
