the soundtrack to this blogpost, and the lead into the meat of it, will be kanye west’s platinum selling album, 808s and heartbreak. at once lauded for being the most honest and least guarded / least image-conscious of kanye’s albums, as well as being a fundamental divorcement from the sound that he had before and a challenge to hip hop’s conventions, it has also been panned as sappy, kitschy and all around a waste of time. i personally love it. i usually don’t like auto-tune, but the entire feel of the album, its foundation in a conception of ‘pop art’ vs hip hop, its ability to transcend its material, the relative complexity of its musicality next to the universalism of its lyrical content… all of these various factors make 808s and heartbreaks one of my favorite albums.
what made me want to discuss the album and about artistic responsibility and artistic license is his video for welcome to heartbreak.
it’s probably one of my least favorite songs on the cd… but the song went up a bajillion points the minute i watched this video. i remember the first time seeing it and being absolutely blown away. recently re-watching, listening to 808s again more generally, it brought up a lot of feelings i’d been having and touched upon thoughts and concepts that i am, myself dealing with.
first the vid itself… which i can’t seem to find streaming and hd, and which you should find on his official website whenever you can as it has the highest sound and vid quality.
sure, the lyrical content isn’t mindblowing by any stretch of the imagination, not even if you were to stretch it to the size of kanye’s head, but… the nakedness of it all, the lack of swagger characteristic of so much of hip hop is subversive and compelling in its own right. don’t get me wrong, i love swagger. the cockiness, that vibe of a young man with all of his arrogant insecurities, that’s what initially drew me to hip hop. but the bareness of kanye’s rhymes and its ability to convey devastation and disillusionment in the face of great success, even if i can’t exactly relate to talkin’ ’bout having a new sports car’, touches me on some level.
and like i said, i personally think auto-tuner is wack 99% of the time. i dislike t-pain with a goddamn passion. but kanye’s use of it in this album and especially this track intrigues me as an artistic choice, using a machine that masks and distorts your voice in order to sing the most bare and least pretentious lines you’ve ever written speaks to an element of insecurity fundamental to kanye’s character that allows him to come across as being more complex, dynamic and truly human than most mcs i’ve come across.
visually, you can’t tell me the mv for the track is anything short of fucking amazing. i’ve worked on a couple of short movie shoots now and have friends who do digital animation and production… the sheer amount of man-hours and vision necessary to put this thing together is mindblowing. the choice to digitally distort, a choice made while fully cognizant of the recognition of this type kinda dismorphia in the generations that have grown up with tv and streaming internet video, is as appropriate for this song as joy in the exploration of a lover’s body. which if you know me, is crucial.
… but, and there’s always a but, considering the album is one big exorcism of kanye’s demons wrapped in a musically interesting package, it brings to the fore questions of the place of the artist, his life and his work. throughout the album, which came in the wake of both his mother’s death and his very public break up with his former fiance, dude excoriates the woman, as well as generally delving deeply into his personal life to illustrate his emotional state. for fuck’s sake, say you will is one big reference to his once-pending nuptials.
shit like this is why you should never date an artist.
or hell, be in their life in any significant way. at least if they’ve got the same sensibilities about art as i do anyway… because i don’t believe in the object view of art, there is no beauty divorced from its context within the human. work that is too divorced from the human, too caught up in mental games and puzzles, that isn’t rooted in emotionality may be art to some, i might even appreciate and enjoy it, but it just doesn’t reach me on the same level. which isn’t to say that i’m anti-intellectual, as i believe that yo’ shit should still be grounded in an understanding of what has come before and with full awareness of the craft-aspect in making
as such, you can see why i feel like, if you’re in any way significant to an artist, that experience will be mined for material. hell, i’ve been in a relationship that was almost nothing but constant drama back and forth in order to stimulate creativity, not to say there wasn’t real emotions there, but our desire for material sometimes seemed more important than any future of us as personalities entwined. which is why i’m personally never dating a poet again. and told my sister she shouldn’t either. stank-ass poets. goddamn.
did a lot of great work come out of that time in my life? yes. did i enjoy the roller coaster of it all? now, in retrospect, i can say i did. at the end of the day though, that shit is destructive as hell, on my psyche, my being, my life in general.
and yes, i continue to dredge up those same feelings to explore my own inner. as i do with most experiences that have had any great impact on my life, because these are the events, that as a sign of their significance, have been enshrined in my mind. i know hella other artists do the same thing. for a lot of folks, their medium is how they explore their inners, navigate the troubled waters of their psyches, resolve the wars that rage when their eyes close, lay siege at the feet of the demons that dance upon their neuroses and soothe the reaver-clawed beast that we all have inside of ourselves.
on some level, it stops being theory and we start milkin’ that shit for all its worth. we draw it to ourselves, are attracted to what we know will scar us in that ritualistically interesting way like moths to the thermonuclear explosion. and sometimes…
then again, aren’t all the painful memories and emotions in us knife-edged? many sided geometric shapes that cut whenever we handle them… and it is only through constant handling, eroding it with newly calloused palms and the impact of tears can be finally dull the blades. it is only then we can fit them inside of ourselves without the constant fear of getting cut.
but… where’s the line between common decency and artistic expression?
life is disce pati.
Maybe you’ve seen it already, maybe you haven’t, but when I was reading this post it made me think of this mv.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obr3jkxlSDs