Ty Brueilly Finds the Beauty in Hip-Hop’s Rough Edges

Directed by Ty Brueilly and powered by the rhymes of ethemadassassin, The Manual is a stripped-down piece of underground hip-hop imagery that understands the assignment, don't decorate the track until it disappears. Point the lens, distort it, dirty it up and let the rapper take the wheel.

The song is the engine. ethemadassassin delivers his bars with the confidence of someone handing out instructions and the video's simplicity allows the lyricism to remain firmly in the foreground. There's an unmistakable old-school pulse running through the piece—a little '90s grime, a little DIY tape culture, and plenty of the visual abrasion Brueilly has made part of his filmmaking vocabulary.

Fisheye lenses bend streets and bodies around the frame, while deliberately rough textures complement the music's unpolished character. Nothing feels excessively manicured, and that's precisely why much of it works. The video isn't pretending to be a glossy commercial production, it feels closer to something discovered on a battered VHS, duplicated three times and passed between friends who know exactly which underground record you should already be listening to.

The Manual keeps the equation refreshingly straightforward: performer, environment, attitude, rhythm. Sometimes that's enough.

Visually, however, the night sequences could use another layer of atmosphere. Stronger contrast and more deliberate nighttime color correction could push the existing grime into something richer and more cinematic. If you're going dirty, go beautifully dirty. Give those blacks depth. Let streetlights bleed. Make the night itself feel like another character.

And there's one image the video almost seems to beg for, ethemadassassin cruising through the neighborhood at night, camera riding alongside him, streetlights sliding across the windshield while the track breathes.

Still, The Manual knows what kind of music video it wants to be. It doesn't need fireworks, choreography or a warehouse full of extras. Brueilly supplies the grime, ethemadassassin supplies the ammunition, and the track does the rest.

No gloss. No unnecessary mythology. Just bars. Read the manual.