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

Author:Graves, Kirk Walker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

“POWER” opens without warning, layering the sampled hook of an obscure 1978 French disco song (“Afromerica” by Continent Number 6) to pave the way for pop music’s Ozymandias. A sudden staccato eruption of clapping hands and atavistic chanting creates a sensation of worship, and as the first verse begins, Kanye locates himself in the pantheon of history – a self-proclaimed superhero for the twenty-first century – while a piercing tornado siren howls in the background. The rolling tank tread of a beat comes in at twenty-four seconds, sampling elements of funk act Cold Grits’ song “It’s Your Thing” (a cover of the 1969 smash hit by the Isley Brothers). A martial fury drives the song forward, Kanye’s ego mobilized and on the march to wage war against…what, exactly? The easy response is to say that “POWER” was the first single from MBDTF and, as such, needed to be a shot across the bow, an unambiguous announcement of his return. The second verse bolsters this idea, taking aim at the cast of Saturday Night Live (and, by extension, the American audience) for mocking him after the Swift incident. He gives a brief account of the impulse behind his self-exile to Hawaii before delivering the song’s version of Shelley’s pedestal inscription, a metaphorical custody battle with Reality for his creatively unbound “inner child.” This Ozymandias doesn’t ask us to look upon his works and despair – he does it himself. The innermost contradiction that makes Kanye who he is, the one that makes him both a great artist and a great boor, is his overindulgence of everything childish within himself. The “custody” lyric evokes images of warring adults, and Kanye becomes one of them in his fight to maintain dominion over his empire of creative egotism. The implosive pressure is enormous, enough to push this Ozymandias toward thoughts of taking his own life with a sparkling handgun. The song’s hook expresses profound doubts about even being Ozymandias at all and then stamps a sonic exclamation point on the whole affair with a sampled quote from the eponymous King Crimson song. The line punctuates the new Ozymandias epitaph for the digital era: “My name is Ozymandias, 21st century schizoid man. Join me in looking upon my works and despairing.”

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