10 Comments

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  Janee

  October 8, 2008 at 2:17 am

  that video was more like WHAT THE FUCK?….what was the concept..i dont get it..and the song..im not even sure i like…NEXT!

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  tee

  October 8, 2008 at 5:50 am

  I LOVE it! It makes me want to see it again. I am so glad somebody let go of the money, cars, and whores formula for once! All the other videos look alike,same girls sometimes too. Can we do something different. Kudos Kanye!!!

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  alauryn04

  October 8, 2008 at 8:05 am

  love the song and love the video even tho i cannot STAND kanye. his arrogance is more than i can bear.

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  RL13

  October 8, 2008 at 2:09 pm

  I love this song…

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  Akesha

  October 8, 2008 at 7:58 pm

  Not really feeling the video but I love the song though.

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  Yoshi

  October 8, 2008 at 11:51 pm

  Hey B,

  I just wanted to come out and say that I found Kanye’s video to be an ignorant, shallow, and shameless objectification of the black body. As someone earlier pointed it out, it wasn’t the blatant degradation of females and promotion of bling culture that we’re used to, but objectification and marginalization were definitely still at work here.

  Kanye may have sought to return to some sort of Afro-centric aesthetic, or even to diversify the representations of blackness propagated in mass-consumed media, but all he did instead was engage the classic stereotypes of ‘African as tribal and threatening,’ or ‘black female as paradigm of exotic but primitive beauty’ and ‘black male as primitive, threatening, and beastly.’

  There are authentic ways to be Afrocentric, and to do so in a visionary, envelope-pushing fashion, and then there are superficial, stereotypical, and entirely more-of-the-same ways to pretend and imitate what a meaningful, very personal Afrocentrism looks like.

  I think Kanye offered us an example of the latter with this video, which is sad and disappointing. Where others might see genius, I see someone trying to “keep us guessing” for the sake of satisfying his own narcissistic self-absorption, all the while failing to imbue some deeper meaning and *real* vision in his work. And I’m not hating too much, because I’m thankful that we have anyone even *trying* to do something different. I just wish he would really try, not just sort of half-ass his way through a performance and show of being ‘an visionary black artist.’

  Kanye is just more of the same dressed up with a shallow attempt at dynamism and vision.

  But B, baby, you be the muthafuckin best! Much love!

  -Alyosha

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  iZeph

  October 9, 2008 at 12:13 pm

  ^^ Well said Alyosha.
  I second that.

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  browngirl411

  October 10, 2008 at 1:07 pm

  Maybe YOU see black men dressed in traditional african garme as “primitive, threatening, and beastly.” Also, The female body is beautiful, it sexualized in American culture, especially if it’s a black woman. People see naked or nearly naked black women and overeact

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  Yoshi

  October 13, 2008 at 10:41 pm

  @browngirl411

  No, it’s not that simple, browngirl411. For you or for me as individuals, our viewing experience can be one thing, true, but all of those images, all of what you’re viewing is not happening within a vacuum–it has a context and there’s background to it. Think about it. Barack Obama is just a man, and like any other woman or man, he is but an individual human being that is truly unique and with a highly unique experience. But he is not viewed as such by American society. On the contrary, he is a black man, contextualized by black America, and every portroyal, every analysis, every perspective on him invariably gets filtered through that lens.

  Similarly so with the image of, say, a hypersexualized black female body or a belligerent, primitive black male figure. Historically, the black male has been kept down in many ways, and one of the most insidious ways has been to construct of an idea of Africa and African-heritaged inviduals as primitive, beastly, dangerous–’less than human.’

  And while I have neither the time nor the patience to school you on the many ways in which this history is apparent in past and present times, I’m sure you are familiar with at least some of them. When these images are broadcast in our society, therefore, the subtle but real influence of this history shapes an audience’s reception of those images. ESPECIALLY if you’re talking about a predominantly white audience, and ESPECIALLY within the United States.

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  Janee

  October 14, 2008 at 12:32 am

  damn ..writing essays and crap..really not that serious