Music Video Review: ‘Runaway’

Kanye crafts worthy candidate for greatest video of all time

Posted on Oct. 27, 2010, at 10:31 p.m.

Rapper-producer Kanye West’s much hyped, nearly 35-minute-long video for “Runaway,” the anthemic latest single off of his upcoming album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” is mislabeled.

This West-directed tour de force, which premiered on MTV, MTV 2 and BET Saturday night, equitably features snippets of nine songs slated for the much-anticipated album and should be approached by viewers as such.

It promises to be genre-bending. Classic rock legend Elton John and indie folk rock band Bon Iver are on the recently-released track list, along with mainstays from Kanye’s discography, such as Jay-Z, John Legend, Kid Cudi and Rick Ross.

The video itself is an ambitious game-changer that could not be conceptualized by any other artist in music today. Played over his polished tracks, the video is often reminiscent of silent films. The actors’ facial expressions and actions most poignantly tell the story.

In the mind blowing opening scene, West’s character, Griffin, crashes his sports car at the same time a half-woman, half-phoenix , played by supermodel Selita Ebanks, crashes into the Earth nearby as a meteorite. West’s personal history is throughout this video – most notably in the crash scene, which references the 2002 accident in which he fractured his jaw.

As the pounding beat of the album’s string-dominated opening track “Dark Fantasy” plays, the unhurt West is shown rescuing the phoenix woman in slow motion as the world seemingly burns behind them.

If this sounds like the penultimate scene of an action movie, it isn’t. The amounts of originality and resources used to create this shot are staggering. You will never see anything like this in another music video.

The nuances of it are amazing as well. At one point, a dinner party scene features all-black dinner guests with white servers, juxtaposing America’s racist past. We all know Yeezy is adamant about his views on race issues, but seeing him put them into this format — rather than a telethon — is refreshing.

In an Oct. 19 interview with New York Magazine, Ebanks said the moral of the video is “the world doesn’t accept, or they try to change, what is different, instead of trying to understand it.”

Ebanks, only called upon to speak once, sparkles as the phoenix woman. At one point, after the two main characters strike up a relationship, a minor character says to Griffin, “Your girlfriend is very beautiful. Do you know she’s a bird?”

“No, I never noticed that,” West replies.

I don’t blame him. Her scant costume, featuring wings, feathers, talons on her fingers, a small breastplate and something far less than (but somewhat like) a bikini bottom, does little to show she is subhuman. Her Victoria’s Secret and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition credentialed features are prominent.

Although he is a charismatic live performer, West’s acting ability is negatively revealed in scenes where he has lines to speak, not sing. Luckily, these instances are few.

Disappointingly, the only time this video drags on is when “Runaway” plays. West’s rapping while playing piano, along with an elaborate ballet routine looks exactly like his electric Oct. 2 Saturday Night Live performance of the song. It doesn’t lend itself well to such an elaborate video.

The best-used song is without a doubt “Lost In The World,” which features an eerie reworking of Bon Iver’s vocoder-dominated, repetitive “Woods.”

This is one of the more personal videos ever made and as far as scale and story goes, it crushes Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, perhaps the most famous music video of all time.

I dare say popular music has not been graced with an artist who seeks to diversify his or her music as much as West since the greatest Beatle, Paul McCartney’s, heyday. This video contributes as favorably as any single work can to West’s creative legacy.

Through music and film, West is running creative circles around anybody, popular or indie, in show business. The new album drops Nov. 22. If this video and the songs in it are any indication, it will be a classic.

Grade: A

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010, 10:31 pm. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.