Towards the end of Kanye’s performance of ‘The Good Life’ on last night’s MTV Music Video Awards, he raced down the stairs (with T-Pain trailing a few steps behind) to another “suite” and then onto the Palms’ balcony for the song’s final, uplifting chorus, framing himself in front of miles of Las Vegas lights. The image was really kind of powerful. On the surface, it’s just one more rapper celebrating his success through gross, super-obvious symbols of wealth but that’s only half of it, because as we all know (it’s become it’s own cliche by now) Kanye’s into contradiction.
It was very Kanye West-like the way he managed to make something pretty great with only what was available to him. The poor lighting, poorer camera work, and general chaos all just served to aid the performance because it never got too epic or grand and that’s what ‘The Good Life’ is about. It’s a song about the being thankful, even deferential to the good-hand one’s been dealt. The girls who have “more ass than the models” and other “minor” but actually major victories. Early in the song Kanye announces “let’s go on a livin’ spree” with the same swagger he might brag about tearing the mall up on a shopping spree. When T-Pain comes in at the end with “It’s the good life/Better than the life I lived/When I thought that I was gonna go crazy”, Kanye positions himself in front of the Vegas skyline for the camera and that image, Kanye in his stupid glasses and fancy tux, performing a song about finally making it in front of a city that embodies “making it” worked better than those goofy angel wings a few years back.
Let’s go back to that line for a bit, “when I thought that I was gonna go crazy”. Going crazy!? I know it’s easy to blow off Kanye’s everyman appeals and blah blah blah, but I think he means and feels it when he refers to the way his pre-fame, less comfortable life really did make him feel crazy. I dunno about you but credit card debt, or that one prick boss, or needing new tires all starts to build-up and I too feel like I’m gonna go crazy…as he says on ‘Champion’, another song tempered with as much sadness as joy: “When it feels like livin’s harder than dying”. So, framing himself, in front of those Vegas lights, on a slowly-dying network’s award show, really did embody ‘Graduation’s thesis: fame is sad, pathetic, and flighty and pretty ugly but holy shit, it’s sort of great and pretty nuts too. Of course, that only needed to be said if the introductory one-two punch of Britney’s vicodin-y performance and Sarah Silverman’s equally ugly cheap-shots (at least Britney is sincere!) didn’t remind you of that little factoid already…a little factoid that at this point, is sort of a given for Kanye. So, he didn’t dwell on it, instead he sort of let it lurk in the background, letting MTV’s obviously lowered budget speak for it, and just dropped another life-affirming rap song.
Then, after the show, he complains about not winning any awards which at this point isn’t even a sympathetic publicity stunt and we’re back to the whiny Kanye that really does seem to lose control of himself. Then, you think about it a bit and watch this and you realize he sort of had a point because at this point, doesn’t MTV need Kanye West and others more than they need it?
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