Staffer's Note

It’s pretty clear, in the midst of Runaway’s most extravagantly overblown moment—CGI fireworks, red-hooded disciples with a papier-mache Michael Jackson parade float, soon-to-be album centerpiece “All of the Lights”—that we are witnessing a Kanye West Moment. We’ve seen them before (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” “Taylor, I’mma let you finish…”), an amorphous collection of instances when West’s superego is simply overwhelmed by a tidal wave of his own ambitions, delusions, whatever. In the end, the rest of us can’t help being swept along too.

This one, though, might be the Kanye West Moment. Fellini-esque camera angles, directed by a man who confesses to never having watched a single Fellini film “all the way through”? Sandwiching samples of Aphex Twin and Bon Iver around a verse by Pusha T, all in the span of thirty-four minutes? Whatever your take on his phoenix-crashing-to-earth minidrama—the allegory more thinly veiled than star Selita Ebanks in her birdsuit—one aspect of Runaway seems fairly obvious: on the Venn diagram of who would and who could make the film, the central region is big enough for ’Ye alone.

And while Runaway is awash in self-indulgence, Kanye’s artistic impulses are often brilliant and always intriguing. Those red hoods are a fairly obvious homage to Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” video; elsewhere, he’s incorporated a ballet scene recalling Swan Lake. Every shot in Runaway is extended, making the whole affair seem more like a sequence of dramatic stills than a narrative. Without doubt, there are some cringe-worthy moments (Ebanks’ adventures with a teacup are cloying and apropos of nothing), but on balance they’re outweighed by the film’s considerable visual gravitas.

Runaway also contains a good amount of material from West’s upcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; between the film and ’Ye’s weekly “G.O.O.D. Fridays” output, he’s released at least rough cuts of almost every track on the album. It’s a defiant gesture: he insists that “hackers” who would provide leaks of the album prior to its release date can’t offer what he does, and that most of the already-released songs feature a different mix in album form. Regardless, it’s a strategy only a handful of musicians have the artistic capital to pull off, and it requires a degree of creativity even fewer possess.

These days, he’s crashing CMJ parties in Williamsburg rocking diamond grills and a gold Horus chain the size of Rick Ross. Or, you know, holding court in his Hawaii studio with Justin Vernon and a good portion of hip-hop’s top brass at his disposal. In a recent MTV interview he proclaimed his desire to be the best rapper in the world—that won’t ever be the case, nor will anyone ever accept his monolithic claim to be the “voice” of a generation as schizophrenically segmented as this one (although in retrospect, our relentless, Twitter-enabled self-absorption probably aligns better with his ethos than we’d care to admit). But watching the absurd climax of West’s debut film-noir, it’s hard to deny that this is, indeed, his moment—in a way few other pop stars could ever claim.

Ross Green is a Trinity junior.