Earlier today on Ellen, Kanye West teased a new video for "Only One" (now streaming in full on his website), one of two new tracks featuring Paul McCartney. The video appears as a home movie — like, if your home movies were directed by Spike Jonze, not your dad — following Yeezy and his daughter North as they traipse across some nonspecific grey countryside.
People were already wondering if these latest softer, more soulful tracks — basically an about-face after the viciousness of Yeezus — marked a new persona for his upcoming album: a Kanye The Family Man or some such. And this video sure pushes that image (debuting it on Ellen actually tells us a bounty about this particular marketing campaign).
Kanye has always used his visual presence as a vital part of his messaging; its how he presents his side of the story, telegraphs stylistic changes, and gently manipulates the discourse around him.
In the video for "Flashing Lights," for instance, his first collaboration with Jonze, he differentiates himself from gangsta rap by subverting some then well-guarded hip-hop codes. Set to the loungey 2007 club hit from Graduation, Playboy model Rita G. pulls up in a Mustang, strips, lights her clothes on fire, and then, clad in lingerie, reveals Kanye bound with duct tape and stuffed in the trunk — vulnerable, stripped of his machismo — before she bludgeons him with a shovel. A flip of the tried and tested game: cars, money, women. His hip-hop could be transgressive while rewriting the script.
For We Were Once a Fairytale, a 2009 short film also by Jonze and a pseudo-video for the 808s & Heartbreak track "See You In My Nightmares," Kanye brings his egomaniac character front-and-centre. At his worst, he craves attention, adoration, and recognition — often at a cost. He knows that. He's sharing that with us here. If people cast him as a villain, he knows: it's because, sometimes, he's villainous. In the end, he's forced to literally cut the monster out of himself.
For Runaway, a film compiling tracks from 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye commissioned a 35-minute Fellini-aping epic. Here he's saying hip hop can be theatrical; hip hop can be high art — sentiments that have become increasingly central to his output, especially around Yeezus.
And then there's Yeezus. He debuted "Black Skinhead" on Saturday Night Live dressed in black leather and projections of barking dobermans. It was bold, minimal staging for a bold, minimal song. It looked like punk rock, because he was trying to tell us that what he was doing now was essentially punk.
In fact, the phenomena dates back even to his first single, 2004's "Through The Wire." Though already a legend behind the board, College Dropout took four years to put together because collaborators were apprehensive about Kanye's skills on the microphone. And then he got in a car accident and had his jaw wired shut. The video charts, even before his solo debut, all of the hardships he had to overcome and what he'd already achieved. When people were doubting his ability, this video was basically a CV of his credentials and hip hop bona fides. Introduction by way of braggadocio.
Today, he shows us a fiery soul quelled and made new by fatherhood and love. Gone for now are the barbs against racism and the lewd sex acts and contradictory warnings about materialism. Even for the thousands of words he's shed, for Kanye, what he decides to show is at least half the story.
Kanye West’s “Only One” video, the latest in his carefully-controlled image campaign by chris hampton | Chart Attack.
