This past Sunday Heems declared war on white rappers, calling out some for cosigning Asher Roth, who once called “black”, “African” rappers “disgusting” for ignoring the way “the motherland is suffering beyond belief right now” (which, LOLZ). I completely forgot how much cognitive dissonance that required on Roth’s part in the post-Late Registration era, i.e. after Kanye released this video.
For some reason this was the song that elicited the most intense emotional response at Watch the Throne, even though I’ve basically kept the album it’s on out of rotation for a while. Perhaps it dredged up some kinda dead part of me - the persistent radical that thought endless arguments with Likudniks at Rosh Hashana brunch would actually end the occupation, that read the first chapter of the Black Jacobins and shortly thereafter tried joining a medical mission to Haiti without any medical knowledge - and jarred me into reflecting on how much i’ve been derailed by hardly-earned cynicism.
The video, which I remember making my parents watch on a Sony Vaio desktop during some argument or other on the usual Katzman family topics (military dictatorships, postcolonial fracture, western guilt, us Jews) is basically Kanye’s Bono moment. The Oscar-glory bombast, the self-congratulatory progressive politics, the all of it. Registration’s critic baiting, over-Brion’d production and haphazardly strung together concept songs seems worth it if just for the culture jamming he did here. Unlike Adbusters (and Bono too, actually, oops!), Kanye’s trademark self-laceration makes for sincere grappling with structural complicity.
After a cinematic prelude that works like a UNICEF instructional reel Hype Williams uses the ghastly phantoms of black-eyed child miners to tear the floorboards out from under a De Beers commercial, turning a pricey white proposal into an all-consuming bloodbath. Not leaving it at a racially dichotomized critique of white capitalist supremacy, Kanye then draws back and undermines his own tastefully extravagant video (b&w scenery chewing around landmarks in the Czech Republic) and has one of the children pop into the back of his car like a lost scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. In what has to be the best tuck-and-roll this side of Die Hard 4 he jumps out his hot car and lets it crash into a boutique jewelry store, before running with the pack of haunting spirits into a church where he’s playing two pianos to no one but God. Christian piety has him charging at himself in clever parallel to the unrealistic, but impulsively grand (and thus very real feeling) sendoff to materialism from moments earlier.
I remember attempting, during that argument, to sync up the video with his verse in the remix that actually dealt with conflict diamonds (self-quoted at the beginning here). Now, though, i’m kind of fascinated by the dialogue created between the imagery and his fame’s a bitch lamentations. It both predicts the gorging “can we get much higher?” excess of Fantasy and the “uneasy sits the crown” paranoia of Throne while recalling the way he grappled with it in Dropout (the “even if you in a Benz” line from All Falls Down) and how it’s also just an ongoing conversation in rap (on a number of levels, as it was a lecture from Q-Tip that brought the whole thing on) even if not overtly addressed the way it is here.
Maybe it’s just my increased detachment but it seems like blood diamonds was part of an issue attention cycle that’s expired, as the only thing I can think of right now is this Forkcast. Maybe we can lay the blame at Edward Zwick’s door, but definitely not on this video.
