Cole Bennett Wants to Create a Cinematic Universe For Music

Hip-hop is Cole Bennett’s first love. Having grown up in Plano, Illinois, he often found himself immersed in the Chicago rap scene. The bars of Vic Mensa, King Louie and Ridgio soundtracked his day-to-day and, since launching his Lyrical Lemonade blog in 2013—on which he wrote about Chicago artists and shared videos he directed for them—the name has since become one of the most powerful brands in the culture. Each Lyrical Lemonade video boasts a cinematic je ne sais quoi, maintaining a storytelling element that seems to be a lost art form in the streaming and content era. With over 400 Lyrical Lemonade videos, 21 million subscribers and more than 10 billion views to his credit, Bennett continues to push the element by packaging timeless music with creative visuals. “The marriage of the music video and a song are very much still intact,” he tells me. “And there’s no divorce coming anytime soon.”

Last week, Bennett released the debut Lyrical Lemonade compilation album, All Is Yellow. The LP features heavy-hitting collaborations with Lil Yachty, Jack Harlow, Emimen, Latto, Kid Cudi and more. Fans who have been following Lyrical Lemonade since the brand’s beginning know that a Lyrical Lemonade video is unpredictable. But with All Is Yellow, Bennett sought to create both a sonic and aesthetic universe.

All 14 songs on All Is Yellow will have a music video, with seven of the clips already having been released. In all of the videos, the artists don black suits with yellow ties and frequently emerge from yellow curtains. As the artists all rep different territories, Bennett wanted these yellow elements to unify the world of All Is Yellow. “I was going to build a standing set, probably in LA. I figured that’s where most of the people would be,” says Bennett. “I thought of dressing the set just a little bit differently for every video, but every video would take place in this one spot. And then I started to realize that would work for a good chunk of the artists but I was going to probably have to go to London at some point, because Central Cee is on the album, and then it ended up being Dave that we went out there for. I’ve gotten to know Chief Keef over the last few years, and I was like, ‘he probably won’t want to leave his house, I gotta figure out a way that we could shoot at his house.’”

Fortunately, Bennett was able to make all of this happen. But one of his favorite days while working on the album took place in Atlanta, where he shot two videos with Lil Yachty in one day—the scorching Chief Keef collaboration “Say Ya Grace” and the forlorn “Fallout,” which also features Gus Dapperton and Joey Badass. The “Say Ya Grace” video was released on the same day as All Is Yellow, and features Yachty emerging from the curtain, dancing on a pier over a lake. Though, a portion of the video had surfaced before the release, without any sort of context. While not being credited can be infuriating, it was through this that Bennett saw a sign that his concept had worked.

“I wanted to get to the point where people are getting annoyed,” he explains. “Like, they can’t escape this damn curtain or those suits. I saw this video going viral on TikTok. It’s like a snippet of the Yachty and Chief Keef video. In the caption there’s nothing about it being a Lyrical Lemonade video, or Cole Bennett being involved in anything. It just says ‘new Yachty and Chief Keef snippets’ And all of the comments are like ‘This is for that Lyrical Lemonade album, you see the curtain, you see the suits,’ It’s gotten to the point where the audience’s eye has now been trained to see a black suit and a yellow tie, without any context beyond that, and know exactly what it means. And that’s super exciting to me, to be able to drive home a theme that far.”

“The second you see that yellow on your phone, or on your TV, or your computer, you instantly know All Is Yellow,” adds Franklin Ricart, the music videos’ director of photography. “And I’ve been telling Cole every time I see this yellow curtain, I feel grounded again.” While Bennett has become a household name within the modern music landscape, his visuals have not come without controversy. The video for one of the album’s standouts, “Doomsday” features Cordae and a deepfake of the late Juice Wrld.

A search for the video on YouTube yields the actual music video, as well as several reaction videos—in many of which, fans are shocked by the use of AI to recreate Juice’s likeness, and others excited to see their favorite artist again. “It was something I went back and forth on, for sure,” says Bennett. “But Cordae and Juice have had a beautiful friendship, Juice and I had a beautiful friendship, and Cordae and I also have a beautiful friendship. There are so many worlds colliding, and if anyone was going to do it, and do it right, I believe that it was us.”

Carlton McDowell, a producer on the All Is Yellow album, was largely inspired by Juice’s work. The two had been friends since they were eight years old, and McDowell had contributed guitar loops and riffs to some of Juice’s songs. Juice had previously introduced McDowell to Bennett, and told Bennett to “make sure Carlton is good” in case anything ever happened to him. Bennett and McDowell had never collaborated professionally until the All Is Yellow sessions, during which McDowell carried on Juice’s legacy by adding an emo and rock guitar element to the several hip-hop tracks Bennett was sitting on. “Energy never dies,” says McDowell. “It only transfers. I feel Juice’s energy with me everywhere I go, and with everything I do.”

Lyrical Lemonade’s evolution from an internet blog to a full-fledged brand and imprint is the result of over a decade of Bennett and his crew putting in work—keeping an essential form of art alive, and pushing the envelope while doing so. While creating a cohesive record featuring 34 different artists may sound like a daunting task, Bennett nailed it with the All Is Yellow visuals, and continues to keep his foot on the gas. Though algorithms may provide a quick and easy path to music discovery, Bennett would posit that the human components of Lyrical Lemonade continue to draw fans, viewers and subscribers. He also credits fans for keeping the name alive and thriving for over a decade. “I think Lyrical Lemonade is the safe place in rap music, where people know that it’s homegrown,” Bennett concludes. “They can feel that real love, they can feel real relationships, they can feel something that doesn’t exist in a lot of places anymore. The underground will always keep that alive.”

Alex Gonzalez is an art and culture journalist based in Dallas. His work has appeared in Uproxx, Billboard, Variety and more.