Alright, so we got some posting on this shit. To cap off video week on C-boys and U-os (in contrast to college basketball's "judgement week", every weeks a something week!) I post up the latest Kanye West video. Mind you I seem to be having some disagreements on the musical merits of 808's and Heartbreak, especially with my sister, but as usually happens as I am older and wiser, she is wrong haha. Now the new Kanye is not a masterpiece, but it is finally a step forward in a new direction for hip-hop/r&b, which, especially hip-hop, hasn't seen much progress since The Cold Vein (Cannibal OX. I would argue that Kanye's last album before this also was big, esp. with its samples of Can and Daft Punk, but Kanye's early stuff, while being excellently done, was still working well within the rap matrix) Hip Hop has the assorted verbal geniuses still going (Ghostface, MF Doom,Sage Francis), and the genius producers (Timbaland, uh..there's others) but no real unified artistic vision that requires a merging of the two to take it in the new directions it desperately needs to remain relevant. This is what Kanye has done, and why he has biggest musician on the planet even though he is not that great a rapper. The best stuff out there has this element of musicality, whether it be M.I.A. to The Bug to Lil Wayne (in his voice) blah blah watever. A smooth flow is not enough, you need to fit into the backdrop, even if the rapping loses some of its complexity.
Ok this extended theorizing may be flawed. But...808's and Heartbreak is good. And we are lucky as FUCK to have him and he can be cocky as fuck as long as he keeps producing illness. Exhibit A: The song Bad News. Exhibit B:
Now if you have a slow computer you may not be able to watch this. And if you can don't worry your computer is not broken. Watch it. Carefully. Your mind will be blown. Props to the director, who threw in the whole history of film into this music video. It is a true masterpiece, with one incredible moment after another: Kanye swirl green windows visualizer like, to him talking to himself, the freeze, and then then he pops in between hidden on the wall, to the right foot tapping and his body sliding across the tv test colors when the synth strings come in. Has there ever been a better music video in its 30 year history? Anything so ambitious so flawlessly executed? the effects and procedures of the past, the pixelated fragments, the internet, the future. And I kept but think it says something about the modern human condition. What that is I won't go so far as to speculate. I'm just going to watch it again.
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