“2020 and I still can’t understand the concept of this video”
“Am I the only one who finds this really disturbing? Most people say it’s disgusting I find it disturbing”
“If you are disturbed, I think that was Kanye’s intent”
“I don’t understand the concept of this video and never will”
These are some of the YouTube comments that can be found in Kanye’s 2016 music video Famous, which currently counts with over 44 million views and a very divided likes-and-dislikes bar (500k dislikes vs. 600k dislikes). In this article, I analyze the music video in an attempt to derive its meaning.
It all began in 2009
Kanye Wests is not alien to controversy, and this particular video is a follow up to one of his biggest ones: the artist’s feud with Taylor Swift, whom first winning VMA award acceptance speech was interrupted by West in 2009, who implied in front of everybody that it was Beyonce who deserved the best female music video award, and not Taylor, a 19-year-old up and coming artist at the time.
The song
They had seemed to be on better terms in 2015, a year in which even Taylor presented the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award to Kanye. However, in 2016 Famous dropped, and the controversy reemerged, given the following lines from the song:
“For all my southside n****s that know me best, I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, why? I made that b***h Famous.”
The music video
But the controversy had just started, and this wasn’t limited to the Kanye vs. Taylor feud. A few months later, Kanye West premiered the music video of the song at The Forum in Los Angeles.
The music video in question depicts 12 public personalities naked in a very (very) big bed. Among them there’s not only Kanye, his wife Kim, and Taylor Swift (next to Kanye) herself, but we can also see: next to Kim, Ray J (who has an infamous sex tape with her, which a lot of people claim is what made Kim famous); Kanye’s mother-in-law Caitlyn Jenner (only a year after her controversial gender transitioning); Chris Brown next to Rihanna (whom Brown assaulted back in 2007); George Bush (Kanye accused him of not caring about black people back in 2005); Donald Trump (who at the time was on his controversial presidential campaign); Bill Cosby (who in the same year was declared guilty of abusing multiple women); Amber Rose (Kanye’s ex-girlfriend) and Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
Controversy everywhere. But even though this article is not about any of these controversies, it was inspired by a specific Kanye Tweet in which he responded to the backlash he faced regarding the Taylor line on the song:
“First thing is I’m an artist and as an artist I will express how I feel with no censorship”
So what is Kanye really expressing here? What was the video trying to say?
Before we dive into the video, let’s talk about the meaning of the song itself to get into the proper context.
Famous is a breakup song
Famous opens up with Rihanna’s vocals, singing:
“Man I can understand how it might be kinda hard to love a girl like me… I don’t blame you much for wanting to be free… I just wanted you to know…”
Later, after Kanye’s first verse, Rihanna comes back to sign the hook:
“I just wanted you to know… I love you better than your whole kin did from the very start… I don’t blame you much for wanting to be free… I just wanted you to know”
We could interpret the meaning of the song by looking at it as a breakup, one between Kanye and “Fame.” Fame is represented by Rihanna’s part, which samples Nina Simone’s Do What You Gotta Do. Fame is a girl that is hard to love, and she is very well aware of it, so she doesn’t blame Kanye for wanting to let her go.
Kanye’s verses could be representing a past version of himself, during the days when fame started to become his enemy after the incident with Taylor Swift (The Life of Pablo, the album where Famous belongs, is about The Life of Kanye, specifically his famous life). This is an aggressive response to all the backlash he received back in the day, fueled by the braggadocios and bigger-than-life type of energy that comes with fame.
The song interpolates between the moment when this “couple” (Kanye and fame) is breaking up (the hook) and between “flashbacks” of their euphoric relationship (Kanye’s verses), a relationship that only served to feed Kanye’s ego. The hint is on the music itself; the rhythm in Rihanna’s part is way different from Kanye’s, as if they were singing two different songs. One part (the breakup part) is calm and sad, while the other is upbeat and happy.
Then a bridge comes abruptly, celebrating fame once again, this time in an even more euphoric way via hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz’s celebration ad-libs and a sample from reggae artist Sister Nancy’s song Bam Bam. However, all that celebration is fake and temporary. An illusion that perhaps gets broken at the very end of the song, when the hook comes back, this time though, from the “real” source, Nina Simone’s unaltered voice, that reminds us that even though you may want to be free of her (fame), she “loved you better than your own kin did.” She does so in a very seductive way; she “just wanted you to know.”
Of course, fame did not love Kanye back better than his own family did. So don’t listen to her, it’s a trap! An ambiguous duality, which could be interpreted as a family versus fame duality, can be found throughout the whole Life of Pablo album, and the song Famous is just part of the bigger picture the whole project portraits.
Now you may be wondering, how all this pseudo-artistic analysis relates to a music video that depicts a bunch of people naked in bed other than the fact that these people are famous?
The music video was inspired by a painting
The video is certainly not for everybody, not everybody resonates with the message, but it seems like artists do. It was inspired by Vincent Desiderio’s Sleep painting.
This is how Vincent describes his painting:
“It’s been described as an orgy, which is wrong. It represents a communal sleep — which in a larger sense might represent the sleep of our culture, the sleep of reason.”
And this is what he had to said about the Famous video:
“I was really speechless. Kanye saw things that I don’t know how he could’ve seen. Kanye is truly an artist. Talking to him was like speaking to any of my peers in the art world — actually, more like talking to the brightest art student that have their eyes wide open”.
But what are those things Kanye saw that Vincent didn’t know how he could’ve seen?
This is what Kanye had to say about the video during a speech at the 2016 VMA’s:
“It was an expression of our now, our fame right now, us on the inside of the TV. This is fame, bro…”
It can certainly be funny to picture Kanye (or anybody for that matter) looking at the Desiderio painting and going “yup, that’s fame right there, bro.” Especially when what the painter intended to portrait (the sleep of our culture, the sleep of reason) had nothing to do with fame…
Right?
It might not be a coincidence that Kanye decided to start the vide oclip with a quote of himself, from his 2013 interview with BBC’s Zane Lowe:
“We culture! Rap is the new rock n roll! We the rock stars!”
So there might be an element of shared meaning between the Famous video and the Sleep painting. West could’ve been inspired not only by the painting itself but also by its meaning.
But it doesn’t stop there: the video adds to the meaning. Desideiro continues in regards to Famous:
“What I like about it is, it’s not a reproduction of my painting: It’s a conversation with my painting. The discursive element of that is far more important than the simple idea of he stole the idea, he co-opted the idea, he did this to the idea. He quoted the idea and then brought something different to it, embedded in the strange thinking that went on in my head as I worked on the picture.”
But if Famous (the video) has indeed a relation with Sleep, does it have one with Famous (the song) also?
The meaning of the music video
If the song’s message was to represent a break up with fame, maybe the video, instead of doing the same thing, shows us the why, why he wants to break up. And that’s the difference. The video is not an interpretation of the song; instead, the video adds to the story.
Famous people often feel that they have no privacy; people and the media are obsessed with them, even when they are vulnerable (sleeping and naked). To illustrate that, the video, directed by Kanye himself, puts the viewer in the perspective of a stalker. There are about 4 minutes with no music at all, where the spectator simply looks at the people in bed and hears them breath. It’s uncomfortable and disturbing, as expressed by some of the YouTube comments:
“I feel like I’m watching something from the deepweb, the camera quality, the dark background, the fact that they’re all stripped”
“I feel like I’m watching something that could get me arrested”
But that’s exactly the purpose of the video, to show how ridiculous it is to be obsessed with people who are just human beings who sleep in the same world and breathe the same air. As Kanye puts it during the same VMA speech:
“we [famous people] are all in the same bed.”
If being in a relationship with Fame entails that you are one of the people in that bed being watched, can Fame blame Kanye for wanting to break up?
Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog also commented on the video:
“There’s all of the sudden a guy out there in the world of rappers who is doing something that I’ve always tried to get across to people who want to make movies. I try to explain them that there’s not just a story that you are telling and you are concocting some sort of relationship between people… I try to embed, to implant moments where time doesn’t matter anymore. There’s a standstill, there’s only breathing. The facts that they’re just breathing and imagining is wonderful about it. This is very good stuff. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
But in the end, Kanye couldn’t break up with Fame
Lastly, the video ends with a still shot of a sunrise and the entirety of the song Father Stretch My Hands, Pt.1, from the same album. Kanye wakes up to a beautiful morning. Kid Cudi on the pre-chorus sings:
“Beautiful morning, you’re the sun in my morning, babe… nothing unwanted.”
Perhaps Kanye wakes up and he is still famous. He fell for the trap; he is still in a relationship with Fame. But the duality persists, and Kanye’s part in this second song, once again, serves as a contrast to the pre-chorus:
“I just want to feel liberated.”
I won’t blame him.
