Video Watch #3: Kanye West, “Love Lockdown”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed the death of “music television” and the movement of music videos to online formats. It used to be that every new video “premiered” on MTV/BET, but these days debuts happens all over the place. The Weezer “Troublemaker” video premiered at Yahoo! Music, and Kanye West’s video for “Love Lockdown”—the hauntingly poppy lead single of his forthcoming 808s & Heartbreak album—gave its “world exclusive” to the Ellen show. Seriously!?
What’s going on when a “hip-hop” artist premieres his video on the daytime talk show of a white lesbian? Maybe it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Hip-hop is truly mainstream—even stay-at-home moms and homosexuals like it! Maybe ‘Ye is trying to pull an Obama and win over that middle-aged female demographic in anticipation of his album release. Or maybe the music industry is truly grasping at straws.
But I digress. Hit the jump to peep the video, and we’ll discuss why Kanye’s American Psycho swagger-jacking fails to inspire.
When I was an English major in college, I wrote my senior thesis on Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, so it’s always exciting to see references to the book and film crop up in pop culture. And I have to admit, this video did get me thinking about how Patrick Bateman, the psychotic narrator of the novel, is a perfect proxy for the rapper stereotype. Think about it: they’re both obsessed with designer labels, fixated on money, and consumed with violent fantasies that don’t actually have any basis in reality. Perfect match.
Unfortunately, the video has no actual connection to the film besides the fact that it borrows the white-washed, yuppified aesthetic of Patrick Bateman’s apartment, and I guess the slightly creepy lyrics allude “thematically” to love gone wrong and the loss of control (though hopefully not “wrong” in the American Psycho sense). Beyond that though, it’s basically just odd (much like the rest of Simon Henwood’s oeuvre). Going minimalist does not necessarily work well with a song as dull and repetitive as this one, but if you’re going to do it, go all the way. Why the hell does a spaceship show up at 2:09?? And who ganked the Day-Glo painted tribespeople from the “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See” video??
Even though Yeezy does manage to bring some nice looking women into the mix, I’m gonna have to say that this is his second misstep in what I’ll dub the”art house music video” genre. Not to sound small-minded, but can he please hit up Hype and sort this out! I am convinced that Hype Williams has Kanye pegged to a tee. Even though Williams’ self-branding of videos is getting a bit much recently, I think he and ‘Ye still have good work left to be done.
