The Brag

KAYNE WEST’S RUNAWAY

“I think music is the loudest form of art,” says a black-suited, understated Kanye West, mid-way through his one hour Q & A – in what may be the closest many of us will ever get to the most innovative mind in music today. The Sydney Runaway screening was the celebrity event of the year, if only because the biggest celebrity in popular music (aside from Lady GaGa) managed to single-handedly dispel every myth about his output, his demeanour and his commitment to his work in one evening.

From the gloriously oversaturated and highly stylised hip-hop-companion-to-A-Single-Man that was his forty-minute music video, through to an extended discussion on the nature of high and low culture, Kanye West turned out to be quite the opposite of what everyone expected. And for a longtime fan, it was a rare and wonderful experience that will probably never be repeated.

Runaway, which showcases a bunch of new songs from West’s upcoming record, was breathtaking. From the extended ballet scene based around the title track through to the closing piece which samples Bon Iver’s ‘The Woods’, pretty much everything about it was as over the top as it was fascinatingly imaginative. After the film, West would reveal his plans to base the central phoenix character’s wings on work by Alexander McQueen, his huge battle with reining in his opinion when not in the studio (read: Taylor Swift), and how the entire film represented his own personal rise back from the ashes.

What surprised me most was not only West’s humility (“There’s some stuff in here that’s so amateur that no director would do it, so I had to do it myself”), but also his expansive knowledge of world cultures, and impassioned railing against the high art establishment (“Why does ‘popular’ have to mean ‘bad’?”). From Thom Yorke to Fendi, Tokyo to Hawaii, West proved without a shadow of a doubt that not only does he love to talk, but he also knows explicitly what it is he’s talking about. For a man whose public persona has been constructed by contextually confused soundbites, hearing an unfiltered vision straight from the horse’s mouth was monumental.

One thing everybody agreed upon was that the new tracks previewed in the film were some of West’s finest – a huge call, given that his first album topped many Best Of The Decade lists. But the rhymes were top-notch, the vocoders mostly absent and the hunger that West has to regain his place atop the hip hop heap was palpable. With many references to Michael Jackson, both visually and in the length of the film itself (an homage to the extended version of Thriller), it was clear where West’s ultimate aspirations lie. And though he’s still got a bit of soul-searching to do, massive projects like this – as brilliant as they are risky – show that he’s definitely on the right track. Now all we have to do it sit back and wait for record number five to totally destroy the radio this summer…

Jonno Seidler