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One Video: Still Got Time by Zayn ft. PartyNextDoor

One Video: Still Got Time by Zayn ft. PartyNextDoor

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High stakes for a chill party

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Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for how long.

This week’s video: “Still Got Time” by Zayn ft. PartyNextDoor

Kaitlyn: It seems like every week that Lizzie and I come in here and say “it’s almost summer, how about an almost-summer song to make you feel nice.” And you know what? Good. That’s just how I think it should be. “Still Got Time” is an almost-summer song, about love, and it will make you feel nice. The video is a shimmery party highlight reel of beautiful people and clinking ice cubes.

Lizzie: The first comment on this video is about putting off studying (with Zayn’s permission, as dictated by this song’s lyrics) and it has more than 1,000 likes. You too can use this video to convince yourself that you still have time for almost anything and the internet will likely support you.

Who is Zayn, and who is PartyNextDoor?

Lizzie: PartyNextDoor is a rapper / singer from Canada (I bet you can name another one!). Funny story, PND is on that other Canadian rapper’s OVO Sound record label, and PND, like most people on this record label, also sounds like the other Canadian rapper. So does Zayn, kinda. PartyNextDoor makes sense as a Zayn collaborator because they’re both trying to side-elbow their way into a particular sound by basically copying that sound.

Kaitlyn: “Who is Zayn?” is a question that Zayn has been answering for quite a while. Zayn’s answer is that he, Zayn, is very cool — he smokes, he looks at boobs, he drinks, he wanders through house parties without smiling. He’s done all this in videos before. It has been two years since he left the boy band One Direction to make solo R&B-infused pop music, and in that time he has basically never stopped asserting that he’s the cool one. I love him, but it’s a lot.

And he can’t ease up now, since his former bandmate Harry Styles has just taken the first steps toward kicking off his own solo career and, crucially, Styles’ game plan seems to be leaning shoulder-first into the persona of the sincere rock star. In a recent Rolling Stone cover story, he diplomatically danced around a question about Zayn dissing One Direction’s music and then sweetly lambasted anyone who says young girls don’t have good taste. This quote went viral: +1 to Harry.

The great pop star battle of 2017 will be Harry Styles and sincerity vs. Zayn Malik and detached chill. You can watch this battle play out on Twitter if you want.

What’s special about “Still Got Time” by Zayn ft. PartyNextDoor:

Lizzie: Look, we all used to make collages of cool images and hot people that we cut out from magazines, and that’s basically what this video is. At least we (I) can take comfort in the fact that it’s not very similar to the collage I made in junior high with Ashton Kutcher and Conor Oberst on it.

Kaitlyn: Lizzie, please stand by your art! You can learn something about that from Zayn, who takes some time away from the rest of the party to spray paint a green alien head on one of the walls.

This moment is special because, to some, it serves as a callback to Zayn’s time as the resident graffiti artist in One Direction. It was a bit of a meme. He talks about the “graffiti room” in his house in their tour documentary This is Us, set up a graffiti wall at the disastrous day-long Google Hangout the group did in November 2013, and even contributed his talents to the music video for “Best Song Ever.”

Possibly because he is a recreational painter, Zayn is extremely supportive of fan art, and shares tons of it on his personal social media accounts. That’s nice.

How long everyone should watch “Still Got Time” by Zayn ft. PartyNextDoor:

Kaitlyn: I wouldn’t presume to know where you work or what kind of environment it is, but there’s a lot of nudity in this. The song is nice, so maybe listen to it in a minimized tab and just open it at 1:44 to see the graffiti wall.

Lizzie: It’s true that there’s nudity here. Maybe we should’ve mentioned it earlier. Have you watched the video yet? You’ve probably watched the whole thing already. At least wait to see the monkey at the end.