You are the punchline to every joke. The world has seen you at your worst and you have been judged for it. You should be at your all time low. What do you do?
Kanye West was faced with this question after Taylor Swiftgate. He was dismissed eagerly. A dick. A twat. A douchebag. A man who’s ego eclipsed his vast talent. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Kanye had just dropped his most ‘different’ and critically speaking worst album yet; 808s And Heartbreak. This outburst only turned more people against him. So what was he to do? There was nothing he really could do, except for this. In the past few months he has put out one song every friday, all but one featuring other top Hip Hop artists (and Justin Bieber). Oh and he did them all for free. For free! He has an album coming out soon. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It’s all promotion for that, right? Maybe. But he still gave them away for free. For free! And then he gave something else away for free. A 35 minute film, featuring 9 songs (most being small excerpts) from his not yet released album.
The film, written by music video director Hype Williams and based on a story conceived by Mr. West, was directed by Yeezy himself. It begins with a flashforward of Kanye running, open shirted-Mike Lowry style, through a fog laden forest before cutting back in time to an asteroid falling to earth and landing in the path of his car. The song Dark Fantasy starts the film off, with Kanye’s aggressive verse ensuring that he looks as badass as he can when simply sat in a car driving through some woods. It (and the rest of the film) is shot well, each scene does something to purposefully distance the viewer from what is happening, as if to purposefully shatter any suspensions of disbelief and make the audience sit up and listen. After the meteor crashes down Kanye steps out of his car to survey the scene (as you would) and finds a phoenix. A scantily clad phoenix girl to be precise. He picks her up and walks away, just to prove that cool guys don’t look at explosions.
After falling in love with each other Kanye brings her to a dinner, where the all (black) guests are waited on by (white) servants and the phoenix’s strangeness is regarded with contempt by the guests, prompting Kanye to launch into one of the best songs of this year. “Runaway”, the song which the film is named after is brilliantly personal. Listing his faults in regards to the relationship that broke his heart and inspired 808s and telling the girl to “Runaway as fast as you can.”. It brilliantly tackles the subject of Taylor Swift by stepping over it. Kanye is dealing with the root of what made him do ‘it’ and not the action itself. As a song, it works, with a nice hook and a brilliantly minimalistic bit of piano tinkling. The video features some brilliantly filmed ballet as Kanye plays piano in front of the dancers. The events take place behind a lot of the guests, the phoenix being the only one interested even as Kanye steps onto his piano to emote the lyrics as the instrumental fades.
The dinner goes on after the interruption, but the scene ends when the main course is revealed to be a turkey. Any dreams of bird on bird action are cut short as the phoenix bursts into tears and dinner is ruined. Kanye and his date are left alone. She asks where statues come from and he answers as anyone would, saying that they are carved by- but she cuts him off, saying that they are phoenix turned to stone, after this kind of awkward scene Yeezy makes love to her, then wakes alone, runs through the forest as we saw at the start but fails to catch the phoenix rising back into the heavens, unsatisfied with what she has found on earth. So yeah. It’s a bit of an odd movie, the delivery of what few lines there are in it seems purposefully mechanical and whilst the relevance of things can be hard to get at first, it does become a lot easier to interpret the more you watch it. The car crash at the beginning mirrors Kanye’s own that happened at the start of his career, birthing his career and letting his talent free, both being symbolized by the phoenix, the bizarre Michael Jackson head parade scene is him meditating on the relationship between fame, talent and death. The ending shows that the heartbreak, the public shunning and the disgust he feels at being told he simply “can’t” are just obstacles and that he must let his talent rise like his phoenix does.
It is filmed brilliantly. The images are striking, the lights are bright and the sounds (when they are heard between music) are fantastic, the intruding shuffling of feet as the ballet dancers enter the dinner party is a fantastic moment. Kanye has found the perfect relationship between film and music, film is a medium designed by committee and so can rarely touch the level of personal emoting that is displayed in many artists solo albums, however here Kanye is at his most personal, perhaps Taylorgate has changed him. Maybe he wants to show who he is, what he thinks and feels on his own terms, instead of allowing his ideals be the subject to guesswork and conjecture. Regardless of why he felt like this piece needed to be created, it is a brilliantly stylish and endlessly interesting work.
