Last week we enjoyed the worldly wisdom of Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell, so this week I thought we could move on to the underworld by balling out with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony‘s “Tha Crossroads,” one of my favorite songs of all time.

“Tha Crossroads” is about losing a homie (in this case Eazy-E) and how sometimes the only way to honor your fallen brother is turn gangster rap into a barbershop quartet performed four times as fast. The Thugs – Bizzy Bone, Krayzie Bone, Wish Bone, Layzie Bone, and Flesh-n-Bone – deserve exceptional respect for their work on “Tha Crossroads.” Not only is it an epic meditation on youth, death, and the violent realities of thug life set to stellar production, but they go the entire song without using the phrase “gotta smoke that hydro whoa,” something they were unable to do to date in their career.

The video itself is an audiovisual experience like none other. Bone Thugs start the video at a funeral where a diegetic gospel choir sings a hymn, introducing the main character of the music video, the grim reaper. In case you didn’t know the grim reaper wears a trenchcoat, leather hat, shades, and has a pair of white, feathery angel wings hidden beneath all of this. As the song proceeds we get various shots of the reaper haunting the Thugs. He takes out a homie early on, then Uncle Charles (“oh ya I miss my Uncle Charles, y’all” at 2:31), and then a newborn child in a hospital. Finally he takes all of these souls (Eazy-E included) to the crossroads (a gigantic mesa in the middle of no where under a CGI firy sky) and ascends. This video is so deep you’ll fall in and break your ankle just watching it. Leave it to the Bone Thugs to bring tha wisdom and truf in a four and a half minute epic.