A post from Big Screen Little Screen turned me onto a music video created by Kanye West’s editor, Derrick Lee, using footage of 2046 for Kanye’s “Flashing Lights.”
It’s almost sacrilege to not watch this in High Definition, but the video remix still shames the original Spike Jonze helmed spot.
I couldn’t say it better myself. Wong Kar Wai’s2046 is a long, visually indulgent meditation of love in bad timing, grief and the futility of anything else in life to play love’s substitute. In some way, Derrick Lee’s editing was able to grab the essence of love lost in what you might call a world of “affluent dystopia.” A hyper-realized city, like Tokyo or LA, where lives and opportunity are crammed together so tightly it would seem that making connections would be easy, but it’s only become harder. Human intimacy is the new luxury nobody can afford, but people spin their wheels faster. They collide but never connect. In short, repurposing footage from 2046 for “Flashing Lights” brought new meaning to a song I’d normally switch off. …Read more
Brandon Soderberg has a great post on No Trivia about the Spike Jonze/Kanye West video that debuted last week, “Flashing Lights”, and how it relates to the director’s other music videos for hip hop artists. There’s a lot of great analysis in the post, but I thought it was interesting that, in what’s essentially an auteur analysis of Jonze as an anti-Hype Williams, Soderberg give authorial credit for one of “Flashing Lights”‘ key elements not to Jonze, but to Kanye:
The model in the video, Rita G, is gaining an insane amount of press- which in and of itself, shows how “exploitation” of women for videos is way more complicated than old-fashioned feminists would have us believe- and is a kind of sprucing-up of the classic video chick. She has the thicker body, which is way more attractive than the classic rock image of the rock video chick or the sexless but cute and super-safe “hot” but not too hot indie chick staple, but Kanye puts her in lingerie instead of underwear and gives her actual poise and confidence. The video girl now takes actual center-stage, no longer being only ass and titties but the thematic and emotional focus of the video too. It’s a kind of “revenge of the Gold-digger”, as Rita G’s modern mixed with vintage lingerie were first seen in Hype Williams’ video for ‘Gold Digger’, Kanye’s most explicitly negative song about women (and one of his biggest hits…surprise surprise).
The video is so much about costuming (everyone’s talking about what happens with the shovel, but it seems even more significant that before the model enacts her revenge, she shrugs off a fur coat and what appears to be a designer dress, only to set them on fire before returning to the car to perform the video’s violent climax) that Soderberg is totally spot on to read what the model wears as a vehicle for the clip’s ideology. But how are we to know that this was a decision made by the author of the song and not by the clip’s ostensible director?
Fimoculous points to “Part 1″ of “Flashing Lights”, Spike Jonze’s method of paying the mortgage whilst struggling to finish Where the Wild Things Are/new music video for Kanye West. Rex brands it as “basically hip-hop’s ‘November Rain’”, but I see it more as a Colin Farrell-less Miami Vice. So, yes––even though I’m no Kanye fan, I totally love it.
…that, and other revelations about what celebrities blog about, courtesy of this feature on Gawker. Surprising: 36% of all celebrity blogging is devoted to “shameless self-promotion”; I would have pegged it at 70 or 80 percent. Not so surprising: statistically, blogging celebrities devote exactly as much virtual ink to “indecipherable rants” as “Republicans.” Nice graph, but I have to say, I’m SHOCKED that the Gawk squad let Jeff Bridges’ use of the word “netiquette” slip by un snarked-upon.
