All That Power: Sharing Kanye West

The first G.O.O.D Friday was on August 20th, 2010. It was a hot day in Brooklyn. I sat on the fire escape (hair pinned up; dried sweat holding it in place), wearing underwear and a cotton shirt. Every few minutes I’d mop my forehead and the backs of my ears with a bandana and try focusing on my breathing. That deep breathing, loose and full, is only possible in the hottest days of August.

The song was “Power (Remix).” The original hadn’t been released yet. It came three months later, on Kanye’s album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

G.O.O.D (Getting Out Our Dreams) Fridays was a weekly free music giveaway Kanye set up on his website. On fifteen Fridays between August and December of that year, a new song was available for download. The entire site consisted of one page, completely black, with a faint Lanvin-esque photograph of a girl with spread legs in the center. The photograph changed on Fridays, but the theme rarely did. Girl on a couch with spread legs; girl at a bar with spread legs; girl in the Garden of Eden with spread legs. The text overtop read the name of the new song available. It was always written in coral red sans-serif type, Impact, which, I imagined, Kanye chose for its name.

Kanye West has always struck me as a mix of talent and social retardation, a publicist’s worst dream. The great majority of what he says and types is regrettable, uninformed, incorrectly spelled, and stupid. But he means every bit of it. In the days leading up to the song’s release, Kanye tweeted a series of loose references to its content. On August 15th, he tweeted, “There’s so many ways to break down the subject of power… me and Kobe went in on it… Perfect person to help out on that.” Later that day (in reference to Justin Bieber’s “Runaway Love”), Kanye tweeted, “OK OK OK… I just started dancing to this joint in my crib and clapping to it way to loud to be inside hahahah…” Then, a few minutes later, he tweeted, “Don’t you hate when people clap to loud in the car… it’s like yo this is a closed area… your clapping is waaay to loud!!! hahahahahaaa.”

I remember downloading “Power (Remix)” on my fire escape—listening to it on the windowsill and asking out loud, “What does he think he’s doing?!” The song opens with synchronized, echoed clapping. Jay-Z asks, “Is this thing on? Oh, I thought they silenced us, ‘Ye. Power to the people.”

And in truth, Kanye had been silenced. Eleven months earlier, at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Taylor Swift won Best Female Video for “You Belong with Me.” Kanye famously ran on stage that night, interrupting Taylor and pulling the microphone out of her hands to say, “…I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time.” He then shrugged, handed the microphone back to a confused and defeated Taylor, and ran backstage.

The aftermath was dramatic. Kanye appeared on The Jay Leno Show the next night, tail between his legs, unwilling to make eye contact with the camera. He apologized to Taylor, saying, “It’s been extremely difficult… dealing with the fact that I hurt someone or took anything away from a talented artist. I only wanted to help people. I immediately knew in the situation that it was wrong, and it was actually someone’s emotions I stepped on. It was rude. Period.”
Jay Leno (pretty heartlessly) went on to ask what Kanye’s late mother would have thought about his behavior. “Would she have been disappointed in this? Would she give you a lecture?” he asked. Kanye began to cry, and after some silent seconds, he said, “Obviously I deal with hurt… I am ashamed that my hurt caused someone else’s hurt. I need, after this, to take some time off and analyze how I’m going to make it through the rest of this life. How I’m going to improve.” He went on to cancel his tour, and spent the first half of 2010 in Hawaii, where he recorded the starts of what became My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

“Power (Remix)” was the first song to come out after the VMA hiccup. Taylor is addressed in the first minute. Jay-Z raps, “In search of the truth, even if it goes through Taylor Swift/ tell her this:” and Kanye comes in with, “No one man should have all that power.” Hardly an apology, but it didn’t matter. Kanye and Taylor had both been offered the opportunity to perform at the VMAs three weeks later in response to the events of the previous year. Surely Kanye would sing a song about Taylor’s talent or why female performers are to be cherished.

Instead, Kanye closed the night with a song called “Runaway.” It, too, appeared on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy later that year. The night of the show, he tweeted, “Each piece of the performance tonight is slowly falling into place… I get so excited to do new things… new energy.” He also tweeted “WWMJD!!” (What Would Michael Jackson Do) several times, and, “I wish my Mom was here but I know she’s looking down. I want to make her so happy today.”

The lyrics of the song were nothing close to what anyone was expecting that night. Kanye sang about his own cynicism, and how he once “sent this bitch a picture of my dick.” The chorus ultimately embraced his behavior. “Let’s have a toast for the douchebags,” he sang. “Let’s have a toast for the assholes.”

The restaurant where I worked at the time had allowed me to stay after-hours that night and watch Kanye’s performance on their 70” HDTV. I was alone in a dark, cold bar with no one in the building save for the dishwasher downstairs. Kanye had tweeted earlier in the week, “I wrote a song for Taylor Swift that’s so beautiful and I want her to have it. If she won’t take it then I’ll perform it for her.” That, coupled with his tweet, “I’m ready to get out of my own way. The ego is overdone… it’s like hoodies,” made his douchebag toasts that much more surprising. I was thrilled. The apologies he made to Taylor on Twitter suggested the song he planned to perform was repentant, and they were sandwiched between a series of bizarre and sentimental assertions. Here are a few:

On how he knew what art was culturally most important for us: “I would have run on stage for Justin that night because Sexy Back (in my mind) was that important… that impactful to our culture”

On how he had been unfairly reduced to a social pariah: “Who’s seen the play Wicked? I’ve seen it 4 times! Other than loving the music acting and costumes… it’s my story!!!” and, “The Wicked witch of the west basically is so convicted to tell her truth when she does it she is outcasted [sic] by society and turned WICKED.”

On how he wanted to take responsibility for the burden placed on his loyal fans: “There are people who have named there [sic] kids after me… can you imagine that next day in school. Even though I don’t have kids…” and, “I am responsible for those who love and represent me and what they have to deal with on a day to day defending ‘The American Psycho!’”

And finally, how he empathized with Taylor Swift: “She had nothing to do with my issues with award shows. She had no idea what hit her. She’s justa lil girl with dreams like the rest of us.”

I started an internship with Saturday Night Live a few weeks into Kanye’s G.O.O.D Friday initiative. Each Saturday morning, I downloaded his latest song and listened to it on loop for the forty-minute commute to Rockefeller Center. The music was so weird—referencing Malcom X and Karl Lagerfeld in the same thought; layering Bon Iver and Rick Ross; and, of course, introducing a duet with Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon and Justin Bieber. When I found out Kanye would be the musical guest the night Bryan Cranston was set to host on October 2nd of that year, I felt a surge of selfish joy.

The SNL operation is much smaller than anyone outside of the building probably thinks. The show has opted to remain loyal to its New York roots and never made the standard move to Los Angeles. An unfortunate side effect of that choice is that the three-hundred people involved in the show are crammed into a very limited space. I knew I’d be able to see Kanye that night.

When Kanye got off the elevators on the 8th Floor, he wore a floor-length fur coat (dyed red), black leather pants, and sunglasses. Surrounding him were twenty barefoot ballerinas in leotards. They were not wearing tights, and I knew immediately that Kanye must have intentionally made that choice.

I stood in the middle of the hallway watching him walk towards (and past) me, into the studio. He bumped into me as he passed, and I softly grabbed part of his coat to see if it was real fur. It was.

Andy Samberg of the SNL Digital Shorts (and Joanna Newsom’s boyfriend, if you like keeping things connected) was one of the first cast members to greet him. I continued to stand still, listening, and heard Kanye say something about how honored he was to be at the show. Andy made a comment about the lyric, “Fuck SNL and the whole cast/ tell them Yeezy said they can kiss my whole ass/ more specifically they can kiss my asshole” in “Power.”

“But I meant the whole cast,” Kanye replied.

“I am in the cast,” Andy said.

Kanye wrote that lyric in response to a joke SNL made the previous season about his outburst at the VMAs. Taylor Lautner was hosting and dating Taylor Swift at the time. In his monologue, he pretended to beat up a cardboard cutout of Kanye West on her behalf. It wasn’t very funny.

“Power” was one of the two songs Kanye planned on performing that night, and he agreed to take out the line about SNL for the performance. Instead, he sang, “The crowned hero, live from Ground Zero/ machine gun flow made a ghetto Ross hero.” Kanye covered the entire stage in white drapery, wore a red leather suit, and came out from behind a pile of ballerinas. He was wearing a gold crown.

With the exception of Bryan Cranston’s accidental, “Ladies and Gentleman, Conway West!” during the show’s dress rehearsal (SNL’s Talent Department seemed to gasp in unison towards the back of the studio), the performance was exceptional.

Three weeks later, Kanye released “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” He hadn’t stopped complaining, and the album was full of pointed fingers and pregnant statements. The song “Gorgeous,” which features Kid Cudi and Raekwon, is recorded with the same washed-out Auto-Tuned drone as much of Kanye’s previous album, 808s & Heartbreak. What “Gorgeous” has that “808s & Heartbreak” lacks is a lot of the gall. In response to a joke made at his expense by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Kanye threatens to, “…choke a South Park writer with a fish stick.” In the particular episode he’s referring to, Jimmy, the disabled eight-year-old, tells a joke which Kanye West doesn’t understand.

“Do you like fish sticks?” Cartoon Kanye is asked.

“Yes,” Cartoon Kanye says.

“You’re a gay fish,” Cartoon Kanye is told.

The joke is that “fish stick” sounds like “fish dick.” The joke is also that Kanye can’t take a joke. After the episode aired, Kanye blogged about it hurting his feelings. He agreed that it was funny and acknowledged that he needed to work on his ego. Nineteen months later, he threatened to kill Trey and Matt in “Gorgeous.”

Similarly, in “Power,” Kanye claims, “…they say I was the abomination of Obama’s nation/ well that’s a pretty bad way to start the conversation.” Of course, no one relevant has ever called Kanye the “abomination” of anything—and certainly not the abomination of the United States of America. He’s referring to an off-hand comment President Barack Obama made when asked if Kanye’s behavior at the VMAs had upset his daughters. In response, President Obama very casually called Kanye a “jackass.”

Despite all its grumbles, the album was unlike anything released before—by Kanye West, or by any musician at all. It featured most of the same artists from his G.O.O.D Friday tracks, with the welcomed additions of Elton John, Gwen Stefani, Tony Williams, John Legend, Elly Jackson, Alicia Keys, Fergie, Drake, Chris Rock, and Gil Scott-Heron. It was part Fosse, part Gaspar Noé, and certainly part Michael Jackson. The cover art, created by the Museum of Modern Art’s George Condo, looks like hip-hop’s response to Amedeo Modigliani. One of the five covers features a naked and animated Kanye West being mounted by an armless, naked woman with wings. In the painting, Kanye holds a green forty-ounce bottle.

For a few delightful hours, I imagined myself as the only fan capable of understanding what made the album so good. Then, on that same day, for the first time since Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” in 2002, Pitchfork gave the album a 10/10—a perfect score.

About Lina Misitzis

Lina Misitzis, from Virginia, lives right outside of Park Slope (but often tells people she lives in Park Slope). She works as an NBC Page and would love to give you a tour sometime.