kanye west - famous

Words by Miriam Rodero

I arrived late to the Yeezy craze. Apart from the well-known hits, I was relatively unfamiliar with his music. I hadn’t been living under a rock, I just wasn’t that interested. I knew he was talented; I knew he was one of the biggest selling artists of all time; but the whole God complex, the baffling outbursts on Ellen, the provocative conduct in public and on social media – I just didn’t really care that much. However, after reading about the controversy caused not only by the lyrics of his recent single Famous, but also by the release of the music video, I decided to give it a watch. Two weeks later, I now find myself listening to The Life of Pablo (his 7th studio album from which the single is taken) the whole way through at least twice a day, whilst also working my way through his six previous albums. But how did I get here? How did this video turn my disinterest and indifference into some strange, profound fascination?    

The 10:36 minute-long video was first premiered on the 24th of June this year to a sold-out crowd of 17,000 people at Los Angeles’ Forum, and via TIDAL stream before being uploaded to YouTube six days later. Following the controversy sparked by the opening line of the song in which Kanye sardonically claims that he thinks him and Taylor Swift might still have sex because he “made that bitch famous” (in reference to his interruption of her 2009 VMA acceptance speech), the video was nothing short of greatly-anticipated. And as expected, West certainly did polarize opinions. 

The video – which is a recreation of the American realist Vincent Desiderio’s painting Sleep from 2008 – shows wax figures of twelve celebrities (including West himself alongside wife Kim Kardashian) lying in bed together, naked and sleeping. For almost the whole ten minutes of the video, the camera slowly passes over the bodies of George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Anna Wintour, Rihanna, Chris Brown, Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Ray J., Amber Rose, Caitlyn Jenner, and Bill Cosby, in turn focusing on certain features of each celebrity. The video goes on to then name each celebrity individually and thanks them “for being famous”. 

Naturally, the response to the video has been varied. While Chris Brown tweeted complaining about his wax figure’s “plumber’s butt crack”, calling West “talented, but crazy”, a representative of Bush denied the former President’s participation in the video, who apparently in reality is “in much better shape”. Aside from the celebrities featured, German film director Werner Herzog has recently marvelled at the video, claiming it to be “very, very interesting” and “wild” – something “essential in real deep storytelling”.

There are whole minutes of the video where the only thing we hear and see is these celebrities sleeping, breathing, lightly snoring. Whole minutes when, essentially, nothing happens. And yet we can’t look away. Here, West mocks our “short-attention-span” generation. Used to the instant gratification of social media, the whole time we are waiting for something to happen. For one of them to wake up; for some explanation as to how these twelve people wound up naked in bed together. But the satisfaction of this explanation never comes.

The video does say a lot about our voyeuristic modern-day society, about authenticity (or lack of) in celebrity culture, about music itself and its relationship with other art forms. However, the video also leaves us bewildered, confused, and above all, thinking. It gives us space to organize, what Herzog describes as, a “separate, independent story that only occurs in the collective mind of the audience”. Sure enough, since the release of the video, many online discussions have begun to theorize about the possible meanings of, and questions raised by the video. Why did West choose these twelve people in particular, and why are they placed in that order? Should he have used the wax figures of these celebrities without permission? Are any of the celebrities real and if so, who? What does it actually all mean?

After initially watching the video, I didn’t really know what I thought. I just knew that I was thinking. I was thinking about everything I had just seen - as shocking, uncomfortable and baffling as it may have been. I was thinking about all these questions. I began to think that maybe Kanye was actually someone worth being interested about.

It’s often said that an artist’s job is not to make you feel anything in particular, just to make you feel – and that’s certainly what Kanye does. You may not like him; you may think he’s just a rambling man blinded by his own egomania. Is it all an act or not? Should his ambition be discredited by his own delusion and narcissism? Does his need to create controversy undermine his talent? The conclusion that I have eventually come to since my first viewing of the ‘Famous’ video is that it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that his work is making us think, it’s making us feel. And that’s not something that can be said for many artists in the music industry nowadays. Maybe you don’t know what it means; in fact, maybe nobody knows what it means. But it’s provocative, it gets the people going.