The Artist Kanye West
“I have ideas that can make the human race’s existence better,” a foggy Kanye West tells Ellen Degeneres on a recent visit to her daytime talk show, Ellen. “I see the importance and the value of everyone being able to experience a more beautiful life.” Kanye’s appearance on the show — in which he makes a number of tacitly connected statements about Steve Jobs, Michael Jackson, and Picasso — was dubbed “insane,” “bizarre,” and “wild” by the outlets that covered it. The Youtube comments underneath the video belie the same sentiment, with most questioning whether or not Ellen was frightened during the exchange. In between answers, West burst into a series of impromptu, crowd-goading expositions where he stood up and thrust his arms in the air like the interview were part of a performance. If you watch closely (or repeatedly), you’ll notice that these outbursts bookend the rapper’s comments rebuking the type of belittlement that assigns West as, in his words, “whatever your friends might say about me.”
On Friday, Kanye premiered the video for his song, “Famous,” a boisterous track assisted both by Rihanna and Jamaican dancehall star Sister Nancy, who’s hit “Bam Bam” is sampled towards the song’s close. The premiere took place at The Forum Theater in Los Angeles after Ye’s announcement of the event two days prior. Outside of the arena, as at all Kanye events, exclusive merchandise was dispensed to eager fans hoping to own a physical ornament of this particular Kanye West spectacle. In February, the rapper premiered his album The Life of Pablo under similar auspices, to a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden. Since then, Mr. West has made a series of changes to the record as well as opened pop-up shops around the world, each containing newly imagined merchandise for the album that the rapper calls “a living breathing changing creative expression.” At The Forum, the crowds of fans buying merch force a delayed start. “I want to give everyone a chance who bought tickets to get inside, so we can all watch at the same time,” West tells the crowd as the timer for the event strikes zero. Sure enough, 45-minutes later, to a packed house in L.A and to thousands of fans streaming the event on Tidal, the show starts.
Footage of Kanye’s most famous outbursts — from his Zane Lowe interview to his televised rebuke of George Bush’s handling of Katrina, to Taylor Swift — flicker in and out like flipping through an old television dial before we see white bedsheets, filmed in night vision, and passed through what looks like a hundred filters, drawing to mind the sex tapes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. The camera hauntingly pans across an expansive bed with a cadre of naked celebrity lookalikes ranging from George Bush and Donald Trump to Taylor Swift and (disturbingly) Bill Cosby, all while Rihanna’s mighty vocals usher the track’s opening moments.
When Kanye premiered “Famous” in February, a small uproar played out in the way that the perennially controversial musician has by now become accustomed to. On the track, Kanye raps, “I bet me and Taylor might still have sex” before going on to add, “I made that bitch famous.” The line, a not-so-subtle-barb at Taylor Swift, whose 2009 VMA controversy with Kanye has left an indelible mark on the rapper’s career, immediately came under fire. Ms. Swift delivered her own not-so-subtle rebuke of Kanye’s lyric during her Grammy acceptance speech, and this month in an interview with GQ, Kim Kardashian West chimed in, saying Taylor approved the line in advance. “She totally knew that that was coming out,” Mrs. West told the magazine. This controversy, for better and for worse, colored the premiere of Kanye’s video. Many believed the alleged footage of West and Swift’s conversation about the lyric would be featured in the clip. Unsurprisingly, the ostensible wax figurine of the pop star, positioned in the nude next to Kanye, was about the only thing people noticed when the video premiered.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Kanye said the visual recalls the painting, “Sleep,” by the American painter Vincent Desiderio. He also calls the artist Matthew Barney, known for blending sculptures with performance art, “his Jesus.” The 10-minute long video clearly draws to mind a number of identifiable works, “The Last Supper” or Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” to name a few, but the subjects here, visual representations of celebrities — stripped naked no less — transposes a new layer of intricacy to the video that only Kanye can exhibit.
It comes as no surprise that Mr. West also described the video as “a comment on celebrity” to Vanity Fair. It’s a natural, and obvious, assessment of the clip that’s sure to be repeated around the entertainment world in the coming weeks. It’s also a limited one. Kanye’s artistic output, it seems, is inseparable from his status as a celebrity, a fact he’s more aware of than he often gets credit, and in the reactions to this latest video, that impulse is as present as ever. Take, for example, the positioning of Anna Wintour, Donald Trump, and George Bush in the far left of the bed. Surely this consolidation of powerful white people was intentional and deserves more attention than chalking the whole thing up to the amorphous term “celebrity.” There are the men who bookend the group, too: Bill Cosby and George W. Bush. One exerted his power to manipulate and assault scores of women, the other to invade an entire nation, turning the world upside down in the process. The video is drenched in these possibilities: there are an even number of men and women in the video, but more white than black, Caitlyn Jenner’s hand grazes her left breast, and on and on. Following the release, Kanye’s only comment was a tweet, “can somebody sue me already.” The “comment on celebrity” here might just be the widespread obsession with a certain pop star’s presence in the video, as opposed to the video’s rich subtext.
There’s also Kanye’s choice of muse. Following the sale of his painting “Sleep,” Desiderio was profiled in The Virginia Quarterly by the writer Lawrence Weschler, where he gave a telling description of what he wanted to achieve with the piece. “You know how when you dream, all those tendrils, those emblems, seem to float about independently, disjointedly, haphazardly, but the moment the alarm goes off, it’s like there’s a rush to assemble all those stray tendrils into a sensate sequence — a narrative,” he says. “Suddenly all that random stuff comes together and momentarily coheres. For a moment, at that moment, everything, everyone connects, it all makes sense. That’s where I’m trying to get with this.” This could easily describe most, if not all, of Kanye’s public interviews, his ideas explode and the shrapnel catch more topics like endless kindling. It’s how, during his interview on Ellen, he was able to incorporate Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs, fashion, and bullying in one fell swoop.
In the Virginia Quarterly feature, Desiderio laments the modern predilection towards irony, and how it creates a barrier between a work of art and the viewer. “As the painting increasingly stultifies to the status of a mere emblem, which is to say a sign and nothing more than a sign, it becomes more and more like an impenetrable barrier, almost a mirror — the viewer gazes in, but all he gets back is a sort of ironical wink, often, in a lot of conceptual work, in a kind of one-shot punch: the illustration of a wink.” He says before pointing out that his goal is to “break through to that place where we are all conjoined. That’s the dream, anyway, that I’m trying to waken to.”
The opening track on Kanye’s latest, The Life of Pablo, is seemingly obsessed with dreams, specifically “God dreams.” The track, titled “Ultralight Beam,” is a shimmering gospel that might be one of Ye’s most optimistic records to date. There’s an unbridled sense that, with faith, we can transcend to something greater, to something that Kanye can close his eyes and imagine, feel even. The entirety of The Life of Pablo returns to this notion, that beneath everything there’s beauty and the purpose of life is to show as many people as possible.
Last March, Kanye curated Carine Roitfeld’s fashion magazine CR Fashion Book. The issue’s theme was “jolie laide” — a celebration of unconventional beauty. “My father once said to me that a pornographic image actually tattoos your mind. It never leaves you. It binds to your senses and your psyche.” West told the magazine, “beauty is pornographic to me, it’s a trigger in that same way — a chemical reaction that moves blood in the body. That is powerful. The other joy that’s the most pure can only come through God.”
On Ellen, Kanye described living with synesthesia, a condition in which sounds can effectively be seen as an array of shapes or colors, telling the talk show host that every song he’s ever made appeared to him as a painting. It makes sense, then, that the video/painting/performance piece for “Famous,” as West points out, saw several iterations before completion. Much like the video’s inspiration — Desiderio continued tweaking “Sleep” for four years after it’s premiere — Kanye is dying to show us something, and he’s still working on what exactly that is.
