Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Graves Kirk Walker

Author:Graves, Kirk Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub

A brief pause here to look at Kanye’s two offi

cial visual

representations of “POWER” is useful, because both get at

something fundamental to the music. Th

e fi rst comes early in

his Runaway fi lm. During the “Gorgeous” sequence – in

which a pensive, furrowed- brow Griffi

n observes the phoenix

lost in wonder among the menagerie of animals in his back

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P OW E R  S I C T R A N S I T G L O R IA K A N Y E 

yard – we get a snapshot of the fi lm’s symbology, with Griffi

n

our proxy for overburdened, self-

serious Kanye and the

phoenix a token of his fenced- in creative purity. Hard cut to

a shot of Griffi

n making love to an MPC2000XL machine, his

fi ngertips massaging the chopped sample of Continent

Number 6’s “Afromerica” into the primitive tribal wail that

pulsates throughout “POWER.” Th

e improvised hook he

creates on his device casts an incantatory spell over the

phoenix, who gives herself bodily to the beat, a spellbound

cobra in thrall to the master’s charms. Th

e sexual self-

aggrandizement here is palpable, which is precisely the point.

At his fi nest, Kanye is hip- hop’s most soulful practitioner, a

shaman who communes with the samples he channels and

the beats he conjures. His sonic collages have a boastful phys-

icality, and in this scene we get to witness an erotic dramati-

zation of his music’s allure and – yes – its power over the

listener.

Th

e other signifi cant visual rendering of “POWER” comes

courtesy of Marco Brambilla, the renowned video collagist

whose works of eschatological excess pack multiple fi lmed

images into the space of a single frame. As reported in 2010

by Dave Itzkoff on the New York Times Arts Beat blog, Kanye

was inspired to collaborate with Brambilla on the music

video for “POWER” aft er seeing his installation Civilization

hanging in the elevators of the Standard hotel in New York. A

motion picture collage of looped images derived from

hundreds of diff erent fi lms, Civilization

reenacts Dante’s

Divine Comedy

with gaudy pop referents like Arnold

Schwarzenegger peopling the spaces of hell, purgatory, and

heaven. Brambilla was quoted by Jori Finkel in a 2011 Los

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M Y B E AU T I F U L DA R K T W I S T E D FA N TA SY

Angeles Times profi le describing the painterly quality of his work: “It’s like I’m making a video canvas where the

brushstrokes are loops or samples taken from fi lm.” Like the

collaborations with Murakami and Condo on album covers,

Brambilla’s “POWER” video ventriloquizes the raw aesthetic

drive of Kanye’s music in the language of visual art. As Itzkoff

describes the video: “Mr. West is seen standing imposingly

with a heavy chain around his neck. As Mr. West raps, the

camera slowly zooms out in one continuous, unedited take to

reveal him in a classical structure, surrounded by female

attendants who are partly or entirely nude; some kneel before

him on all fours, others wear devil horns and still others are

suspended upside down from the ceiling. Th

e sword of

Damocles hangs precariously over Mr. West’s head, and

behind him an unseen executioner is preparing to strike him

with a blade.” Th

e video is a

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