Kanye doesn’t make it easy to take him seriously, but the whole mom dying of plastic surgery thing is genuinely fucked-up and we shouldn’t forget that. While so many famous people talking about their problems seems obnoxious because it’s the same crap we all have to deal with minus the money and girls fame brings you, Kanye’s giving us an actually interesting and rarified peak into celebrity-hood and wrapping it around something that really wouldn’t have happened if he were still some nerd in Chicago making beats.
Mo’ money mo’ problems is something everything can relate to on one level or another and conflicts with girls or those ever-present “haters” too, can be crowbar-ed into the guy that doesn’t like you at your office job or the girl at that party the other night, there’s not really a situation as bizarre as Kanye’s mom’s death that one can actually connect with. At the same time of course, the universal feeling of grief and mourning is there and so each and every listener can touch upon that. Again with the universal/personal reconciliation I discussed in regards to “Paranoid” and “Robocop”.
Perhaps it was that unfortunate fan video that somehow made it onto NahRight, but I’ve started re-thinking the assumption that this is the song about his Mom. I mean, I guess it is, it’s certainly kinder and gentler towards loss than he is on the previous songs and the “winter” aspect implicitly connects it to when his mother died (November, meaning he mourned through Winter) but it really isn’t made explicit at all and he should get some credit for that.
“Coldest Winter” and “Love Lockdown” are sort of the same song or like proper counterparts to one another. They both deal with the in-the-moment very real feeling that you’ll never have or ever want to have feelings for anyone or anything again, one in regards to his break-up, one about the death of his mom. But while there’s some middling feeling of transcendance in those slamming drums or bizarre pterodactyl shrieks, “Coldest Winter” blows up into a sadder desperate cry and it’s continually undercut by those pretty crazy drums that just rip your speakers apart. Even when it veers into “big dramatic ending” stuff that almost every track on 808s goes for, it isn’t given the same time to breathe as it’s all wrapped up in under three minutes. And that’s it. The album’s over. After all that relationship stuff, a final song about his dead moms that never even takes off musically.
Real quick on album bonus track, epilogue or whatever “Pinocchio Story”. It’s at first pretty dumb and in a way, unfortunately spells out what’s already made obvious and laborious on 808s but there’s something undenianbly affecting about it…Kanye rambling to a crowd, not singing, not rapping, and being melodramatic but really honest and forthright too. There’s a point where whining about fame and stuff goes full circle and like, addressing it as Kanye does here becomes brave because you know he knows it’s bullshit to do and he’s like, “fuck it” and doing it anyway.
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20 Jun 12 at 1:35 am