In yesterday's Morning Soul, we posted an item about Kanye's "Love Lockdown" clip being inspired by American Psycho, according to the artist. This is the film starring Christian Bale as Wall Street yuppie Patrick Bateman. During the day, Patrick is a nondescript, clean-cut, and fairly upstanding member of society. At night, he kills people -- colleagues, female escorts, the homeless, you name it. It is based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel of the same name. I have seen American Psycho roughly 20 times and I read Ellis religiously. To that end I think I'm well within my lane to declare that the 'Love Lockdown" video has squat to do AP, and anyone buying into that line should be ashamed of themselves. (Image via Idolator; click to enlarge)
"On this album, I kind of embody Patrick Bateman from 'American Psycho,' " he joked on the [Ellen] show, adding, "You know at the end of the movie [that] he didn't really kill anyone. [I just liked] the clean aesthetic and the way he was all about labels. I wanted to express all of that in the video."
The above quote is very telling for several reasons. On some level, it speaks to the underlying ideas and truths that are germaine to Ellis' work, but Kanye might not realize this. AP is about the excess of the Reagan '80s more than it's actually about violence. Grostesque consumerism, bigotry, social oneupmanship and bacchanalian decadence are all presented in the film and book. Largely, it focuses on entitlement and perception, how a seemingly normal, professional, white man can pass a woman on the street and she won't so much as flinch, only to later become his victim. Most people's interpretation of the ending isn't that it was a dream or that he didn't commit these crimes. It was that he got away with them because society allowed him to, which is probably the whole point.
If Kanye is able to convey these ideas on 808s & Heartbreak, he will have made a believer out of me. But no, the "clean aesthetic and the way he was all about labels" are what inspired him. We're sure that underneath all the brand obsession and other superficialities Kanye evokes on his blog, there's a human heart that beats and a brain full of unique, left-of-center ideas. We've heard it in his music. But the fact that he would draw upon such a surface aspect of Ellis' work isn't a cool thing; it makes him the very sort of person Ellis lampoons in all of his novels. It flies directly in the face of what his apologists deify him for. If Kanye gets it right, it's only because he has morphed himself into one of Ellis' characters -- not in the video or on the album but in real life.
The LL video, as I stated yesterday, isn't that deep and if it was I wouldn't care. If it's representative of anything, it's of him doing something with random visual references that his fans will race to decode in order to classify him as deep and progressive, none of which points directly to American Psycho unless you're counting all that white furniture. As one commenter over at Idolator points out:
"That's exactly what Kanye is counting on here. He is playing on our familiarity with pop culture (which, now more than ever, is chock full of borrowed images - isn't much of hip hop, for example, built upon a foundation of appropriated signifiers?), along with our tendencies to subject pop culture to intense analysis - we are now trained to look for subtexts and hidden meanings, rather than to accept texts at their face value."
This is the same thing we did with "Flashing Lights" a while back. Kanye is able to provoke mythology with his videos, perhaps moreso than Lost or The Matrix. Does this make him a genius? Perhaps, but only because it puts us in the palm of his hand. If a video of his warrants this level of interpretation, then his mission is accomplished, even if there was no subtext or hidden meaning to be found in the first place. That's what a smart businessman does. He places himself firmly within the collective conscious with an incidental mindf*ck that keeps him profitable.
The video for "Love Lockdown" has layers upon layers of unrelated imagery that may or may not mean something, and whatever aspects of American Psycho that may be there are drowned in them. None of this is to undercut Kanye's artistry. It's just that he couldn't have picked a worse cultural touchstone from which to draw his inspiration and that he probably doesn't comprehend its utility. But mainly, Patrick Bateman is not cool. He might dress to nines and have the body of a god, but he's a wimp and a moron. Kanye West is way cooler than Patrick Bateman.
