Wednesday, August 11, 2010

How Kanye West Redeemed Himself

Not to tout my own horn, but I remember distinctively predicting in this here post that Kanye West would have no problem with making a comeback. I said that Kanye will have people quickly brushing off his habits of having diarrhea of the mouth by just dropping one hit record. Nope, I am not a psychic; history just always seems to repeat itself.

A lot of people were quick to jump on the "I hate Kanye West" bandwagon because hey, the guy is just that easy to despise. He's overly confident (and some people envy confidence in others) and is constantly pointing out the things that make him great (and some people don't like people who compliment themselves often). Not to mention, Kanye has a habit of saying exactly what's on his mind no matter how harsh it may sound to others.

Although people will argue that Kanye is done and so is his career, they are foolishly mistaken.

Beyond being a talented artist, Kanye knows how to get the public's attention. He started his comeback by visiting the offices of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. At the moment, those two sites are the go to communities for anyone who is Internet obsessed like moi.

But before scheduling meetings at the Facebook and Twitter offices, Kanye dropped his monster single "Power." The song is undeniably hot. Those who don't like it now will definitely like it eventually and that is because it doesn't sound like anything on the radio right now or anything we have ever heard before.

Again, Kanye's goal to stand out above the rest was met.

He then joined Twitter which was reported not only by the blogs but also national media entities. Something so small as him just signing up and expressing 140 character thoughts (or less) led to him attracting more than 500,000 followers and he has less than 500 tweets. His tweets are interesting only because he is random and as much as people would like to deny it, they like his randomness.

Then Kanye began releasing photos and information about the video for "Power." To put it sweetly, the pictures were weird. First there was the picture of the albino-like female with horns coming out of her head, then there was the photo of him dressed in black staring blankly into the camera and finally there were photos released of what appeared to be people having sex.

This led to the premiere of the video on MTV - you know, the same network that people assumed Kanye had beef with following the Taylor Swift episode? It seems business trumps all because MTV and Kanye orchestrated one of the biggest nightly video premieres (With Eminem of course) that could probably be compared to a premiere of a Michal Jackson video.


The "Power" video ended up not being a video at all but a "moving painting" as it has been labeled. I don't know about anyone else, but even after watching a video of the director explaining the concept of the "moving painting" and watching the premiere live on MTV, I was stumped. It wasn't until I watched it 10 or so more times that everything became clear. Perhaps I'm slow *shrugs* but when I did figure it out I found it to be quite interesting.

The "Power" video was controversial not only because of it's nature and symbols such as the halo with the sword threaded through it that hovered over his head, the cloned woman with horns, or Kanye's chain, but because it was so short. It left people perplexed and wondering where the rest of it was. In essence it did the job of blowing people's minds whether it be for good or bad.

Because it leaves room for thought, the "moving painting" is open to all kinds of public interpretations. Those public interpretations will lead to at least a month of free publicity for a song off of an already highly anticipated album.

Kanye West's unpredictability has proven yet again to be an asset to his career. All we know at this point is that his album that is no longer titled Good Ass Job has been pushed back to November and that we will be receiving a new single in the next couple of weeks; but still he has the interest of practically everyone in the palm of his hands.

What Kanye does next is uncertain - that thought alone is why people can't seem to get enough of Kanye.

Post a Comment

On the charts...