"Up to date / state of the art / take part, get taken apart as I make my mark"
Welcome to the South Easy
Kanye West dabbles in budget porn with his video for Bound 2 (and gives a couple of interviews attempting to illustrate WTF it’s all about)
Kanye, asking his bitch for other bitches
Taking it out of its previous context on the Yeezus album totally changes the way I hear Kanye West’s ‘Bound 2’. There it was almost soothing after the ferocity of what had come before. Not that I’d ever mistake it for a simple love song, this after all is a piece where Kanye wonders aloud if it’s appropriate to ask his bitch for other bitches as a Christmas present, but next to the likes of ‘On Sight’ and ‘New Slaves’ it seemed kind of gooey. Isolated with a horribly cheap video it comes over as nasty as anything on the album. You hear how Kanye’s still shouting out his words, even if they don’t shoot out with quite the same velocity. You see this vicious performance superimposed over cheesy stock footage in an apt mirror of the song’s musical collage. You realise that Kanye intended this song to be his soundtrack for fucking and if you’re cursed with an active imagination your mind might even drift towards an image of what it’s like to fuck Kanye West. Careful, now. Study the video a while. Does Kim Kardashian look like she’s enjoying it? Would you enjoy being penetrated by a multi-millionaire wannabe fashion designer on the back of a motorbike ranting on with every thrust about how he’s so damn awesome? Maybe, maybe not. Far be it from me to judge what gets you off. As long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, right? Then again maybe those kind of questions aren’t even relevant at all. Does it even matter who’s enjoying it as long as Kanye gets off? Just roll the weed up ’till he gets him some. This is Kanye’s world, after all.
Whatever. Having been mostly bored by Kanye West for most of the time since Late Registration I’ve found myself doing a fair bit of catchup since Yeezus came out, since I realised he’d started to make music that appeals to me again. Yesterday I sat down and watched over an hour of him in conversation, two interviews recorded this Tuesday morning, enough to give me a fair idea of where his head is at the moment. The first, forty-two minutes at Power 105.1, has Charlamagne Tha God doing his best to wind Kanye up and mostly failing. The second, thirty-four minutes at Shade 45, has Sway trying to suck up to Kanye and getting roasted for his efforts. Conclusions? When Kanye talks about racism in the corporate world I believe him. What disturbs me is how he doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with the system, just the people running it. He’s very astute in recognising the new slavery but rails against it not cos it’s wrong but cos he’s not privileged enough to be the slavemaster. If you take what he says at face value, that is. What’s really exciting for me about watching these interviews is knowing how with Kanye that’s always a dangerous assumption to make.
"Up to date / state of the art / take part, get taken apart as I make my mark" 