In her new video for “Paradise,” New Haven-based rapper Snowsa — formerly Snowprah — stares down an adversary over the mysterious contents of a duffel bag. Her antagonist accosts her. There’s an argument. He throws a punch. Snowsa ducks it and throws a punch back. She makes contact, and he staggers. She grabs the bag and runs, out into the streets of the Hill, toward friends, toward safety.
“That sauce drip right out my en and zynes,” Snowsa raps. “I think about you all the time / Crystal lights bring paradise / I think about it all the time / I make the flip in the nick of time / I think about it all the time / Stabilize what’s on your mind / I think about it all the time.”
“Paradise” is in some ways Snowsa’s love letter to the Hill, where she grew up, and it’s a song she has never been able to give up on since writing it. She wrote it even before she had a hit with the song “Yank Riddim” in 2018. “I made the song a couple years ago and I always wanted to do a video, just because of how special the record was to me,” Snow (she declined to give her first name) said. The first version of the song emerged around 2016, when “I was producing and nobody knew I was producing.”
Snow has family in Jamaica and met London-based producer Ollie Twist there. “He was there producing for famous Jamaican artists,” Snow said. “We had a session in the car, just showing each other different sounds.” They formed a musical connection. When Twist moved to Brooklyn, Snow “worked a job in Gateway just to get the train tickets” so she could work with him “I would see him every single weekend.” He honed Snow’s production skills. When he moved back to London, Snow visited him there, and they made “Paradise,” which was then called “Unchained.” Not long after, in 2018, they decided to remix it into its current form.
That was the year Snow — then going by Snowprah — rose in the hip hop world with the release of “Yank Riddim.” The popularity of the song led to her being signed by Island Records. Then “we just decided to part ways,” Snow said. She had gotten as far as she had in the music world as an independent artist. She could continue to do so. One of her ideas was to make a music video for “Paradise”; Ollie Twist told her that people in London had been booking recording sessions with him partly to be able to hear Snow’s and Twist’s unreleased material, and that song rose to the top as their favorite.
That made sense to Snow. “Being from the Hill is like paradise for me.” It’s a neighborhood full of family, friends, and parties. “There’s just so much to do,” she said. “We’re doing what we need to do to survive and that’s paradise to us. The same hood you could love so much is the same place you could die in.” Still in her 20s, she has lost many friends, and she feels their presence. “They would definitely be cheering me on,” she said. “They would be so proud of me.”
The pandemic was “definitely was a dark moment just because everything crashed,” Snow said. She began splitting her time between New Haven and Atlanta, to get a fresh perspective. “I learned a lot and I got very enlightened, so I can’t complain,” she said. The disruption of the pandemic “cost a lot,” but she kept her plans to move forward intact.
Sam Hadelman Photos
Snow had met Sam Hadelman when Hadelman — then an intern at WNHH FM radio — wrote an article about her in the New Haven Independent in 2019. She told Hadelman about her desire to make a video for “Paradise.” Hadelman thought of Kevin Mezick, a friend from high school who had gone on to work in film. “I knew Snowsa from Yank Riddim,” Mezick said. His crew work had been primarily in film and TV, including working on an episode of The Food That Built America in Bristol for the History Channel. He was also on the crew of Northern Shade, which filmed in New Haven in November.
Mezick said at the time that music videos weren’t necessarily on his radar, but “working with any type of artist at a certain level is something you don’t want to deny.” He also saw that the project was “something I could be a little different with.”
Together, Snow, Hadelman, and Mezick came up with a plan for the video. The story — centered on a robbery, an escape, and then celebrating with friends — was Snow’s idea. Hadelman had visual ideas to invoke movies from 1983’s Scarface to the 1990s movies King of New York, New Jack City, and Pulp Fiction. “We wanted to make it look nostalgic, like the song,” Hadelman said. Snow gave them a budget. Hadelman handled the logistics of putting the project together. Mezick shaped Snow’s idea into a filmable concept.
“Kevin just brought it to life, him and his crew,” Snow said.
“I came up with a storyboard,” Mezick said. “She gave the OK. Then I worked my ass off and we got it done,” he added with a laugh. “My main goal with the music video was to create something that feels large scale and movie-like”; it was “specifically the type of project I want to create.”
That meant, in part, creating a set to film the interior shots in a warehouse in Hamden. Filming took place over a weekend in May with a crew of six, including Kewan J. Harrison as director of photography. “The way that he’s able to emulate a lot of the things is the reason I picked him for the project,” Mezick said. The clothing in the video was a mixture of Hadelman’s and Snow’s. All the interior shots were done on the Saturday of that weekend; the street shots, in the Hill, were done on Sunday.
The video marks a possible turning point for Mezick and Hadelman. “I’m gearing more toward directing,” Mezick said. Assembling the crew for the video represented a shift from “‘I’m working for you’ to ‘can you work for me?’” And in contrast to directing shorts or feature films — which after completion, then require legwork in finding distribution and ways to screen a film, — music videos happen fast. In the first week after the release of “Paradise” on social media platforms at the end of June, 50,000 people watched it.
“it’s kind of a win-win for everyone,” Mezick said, who enjoyed the near-immediate feedback he got on his work. “I’ve been contacted by other artists” who would like him to help them make music videos.
For her part, Snow is cognizant of and grateful for the people who remain fans of hers before and since “Yank Riddim,” joining and leaving Island Records, and now at what is hopefully the tail end of a pandemic.
“I’m at a rebuilding point,” she said. “I caught so much success on my own, there’s a lot of pressure to do it again.” She has been writing and producing new music, and “my plans are to take Connecticut to the world,” she said. “I’ve definitely kicked doors down and there are results, and that makes me very happy to see. If you’re doing the work, you’ll be found,” she said. But “you got to do the work, now that the eyes are there.”