Kendrick Lamar’s ‘The Heart Part 5’ Video Kicks Off Partnership With ‘South Park’ Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorIt took a village to create Kendrick Lamar’s mind-melting new video for his song “The Heart Part 5,” which on the surface is just him performing in front of a red backdrop until you realize that his face deepfakes into those of OJ Simpson, Jussie Smollett, Nipsey Hussle, Kobe Bryant and Kanye West (who, ironically, himself dropped a video the same day using deepfake technology).While the video was directed and executive produced by Lamar and longtime collaborator Dave Free and features a host of creative collaborators (listed below), the deep fake is credited to Deep Voodoo, a studio launched by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone to specialize in the technology — and the “The Heart Part 5” video appears to be the first fruit of a partnership between Lamar’s PGLang company and the “South Park” founders’ Park County banner to produce a new feature film for Paramount Pictures. (While Lamar, Parker, Stone and reps for PG Lang and Deep Voodoo all declined Variety’s requests for an interview about.) The Deep Voodoo studio — the name of which almost certainly was chosen in part for its phonic similarity to the term “deep doodoo” — made its first major splash late in 2020 with “Sassy Justice,” a spoof of a television investigative report on deep fakes done in collaboration with actor Peter Serafinowicz.