C.Hill Gave Mid-2000s Rap Classics the Music Videos They Deserved Through the Magic of 'The Sims'

The remix for Swizz Beats’s 2007 single “It’s Me Bitches” does not have a video. The original does, but on the remix Lil Wayne lets her lick the rapper, R. Kelly beats his chest like King Kong and Jadakiss raps over “C.R.E.A.M.” for some reason. It deserves a full treatment. Luckily, in the face of this egregious oversight, C.Hill Original Productions went ahead and made this video on his own using life-simulating PC game The Sims.

C.Hill’s version is pitch perfect. Weezy spits his French and patois-infused verse half from a porch somewhere verdant, half in a black room with a Bentley and a video girl. R. Kelly appears in a blinding beam of light, resplendent in an ivory-white suit. Swizz rocks an all-over print Kid Robot hoodie. Jadakiss looks (ironically) more like 50 Cent than himself, but C.Hill nails everything else. The editing is perfect, with frequent cuts between different angles and locales for each artist (and even cribs the accelerating cuts from the video for the original for continuity). The hand motions even match the lyrics.

The C.Hill Original Productions YouTube page has a couple dozen videos, mostly from between 2006 and 2008. They’re all thoroughly entertaining, and not just for the range of actions one can apparently make a character in The Sims do. The videos for Tupac’s “Shorty Wanna Be A Thug” and Jay-Z and Beyonce’s “Hollywood” follow the narratives without being overly literal. His take on The Shop Boyz’s “Party Like A Rock Star” is even better than the thematically similar official video: the Boyz and some girls trash a hotel room, pissing off the downstairs neighbors. Somebody plays a guitar solo on a beach. Computer generated bikers play the token “white” element.

For his part, Hill is now in his mid-20’s and lives near Houston. He never had any particular interest in movies or music videos before he started dicking around with Sims characters. But he has managed to finesse that hustle into work: he now freelances as a video editor, photographer and web designer.

After racking up views in the mid-six figures (and over 1.7 million for his version of Akon’s “Tired Of Running”), Hill started making original videos for artists. In 2007, he linked up with Huntsville’s DJ Snake (not to be confused with the European “Turn Down for What?” guy) for “Rocking With My iPod,” featuring a pre-rap internet fame G-Side. The clip smartly flipped the iconic “silhouette” iPod ad campaign, as well as a couple notable rap video tropes (the corny white guy, an interlude featuring a different song entirely). The shot of G-Side’s ST straight up ignoring his girl while she yells at him is hilarious in its own right.

Although a rap song about iPods with a beat reminiscent of Nelly’s “Grillz” is already nearing peak 2000’s, the collaboration also exemplifies the doors the internet opened up for artists around that time. In C.Hill, Snake and G-Side found a talented video director with consumer technology good enough to implement his vision. The result lacks polish but totally gets the point across, a phrase which basically describes every innovation in hip-hop. And in context, the videos are hardly janky. Only six years earlier, Russell Simmons touted a straight-up crappy computer-animated Ja Rule video as the future of entertainment. C.Hill’s videos look almost identical to Master P’s (awesome) “Souljas” video from 2000. 50 Cent’s 2009 “Piggy Bank” looks like what C.Hill might do with a bigger budget.

Watch more amazing C.Hill original productions below.

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