Rather than carry the momentum of “Power” over to “All Of The Lights,” a minute or so of classy piano and cello’s placed between the two songs. It’s an appropriate moment of pause after a song that just sonically portrayed a suicide and it compartmentalizes MBTDF, sectioning off the next group of guest-heavy tracks: “All Of The Lights,” “Monster,” and “So Appalled.” There isn’t a clear narrative to MBTDF, so the interlude isn’t the Kanye character ascending to heaven (or hell) after the suicide or anything, but it is a conventionally beautiful pillow of music on an otherwise ugly-sounding album. Free of samples, or even drums, “All Of The Lights Interlude” is the least “hip-hop” thing Kanye’s composed.
The “joke” of this interlude though, is that it doesn’t prepare listeners for “All Of The Lights” at all. A blur of male vocals (it mostly sounds like Tony Williams and Charlie Wilson) interrupt the Oscar-winning score-sounding interlude and start the real song, which grabs from the least refined, most un-classy urban sound imaginable: Baltimore club music.
While it may sound like this Baltimore boy is committing some strange act of homerism here, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest Kanye’s quite familiar with club music. Kanye was on an official a remix of DJ Class’ minor 2009 Baltimore club/pop hit, “I’m The Shit,” even shouting out Baltimore label Unruly Records. The stretching and contracting, high-energy horns are a Baltimore club staple and “All Of The Lights is basically an amalgamation of a few club hits and derivations. It’s one part M.I.A’s “XR2″ (produced by Diplo, no stranger to Bmore club, while other songs on Kala were produced by Baltimore’s Blaq Starr), another part Debonair Samir’s “Samir’s Theme” (which “XR2″ is basically trying to be, and was rapped on by Swizz Beatz for “I’m Cool”), mixed with the aggressive patience of the O.G horn-club classic, “Tear Da Club Up” by DJ Class.
DJ Class – “Tear Da Club Up”
Above is a player so you can hear “Tear Da Club Up” in its full, five-minute glory (no You Tube video features the whole song). The mp3 is from Reggie Reg’s The 9 O’Clock Mix, a fairly popular late 90s mixtape, so you hear another song mixed in towards the end, but it does illustrate the similarities between “All Of The Lights” and “Tear Da Club Up”. Namely, this loping, stretched-out and then stuttering triumphant horn.
Kanye though, adds plenty (arguably too much) flavor to that horn track, turning Baltimore club into a symphony of pop stars, kitchen-sink instrumentation, all bobbing and weaving around an epic but fairly simple dance track. Like the best dance songs, “All Of The Lights” is full of change-ups and slight modifications and it seems like Kanye wanted to treat his vocalists like piece of the song, not “guest spots.” And sure, part of this song is a not-so-quiet boast about the kind of starpower Kanye can dial-up, even for just a few seconds, but all the celebs are being mixed up and down and organized like instruments–and it really works!
The first half of “All Of The Lights” is a Kanye West track featuring Rihanna. Rihanna’s demand to “turn all the lights on” because she wants us all “to see” is a continuation of MBTDF’s sense that things aren’t as they appear. By turning all of the lights on, everything’s exposed for what it really is. Most explicitly, Kanye continues this point on “Hell Of A Life,” when he asks judgmental fashionistas, “How can you say [porn stars] live life wrong? When you never fucked with the lights on?” In typically lewd, clever Kanye fashion, “fucking with the lights on” becomes a metaphor for seeing things as they really are–unadorned, and unmasked.
Two whole verses and Rihanna’s hook a bunch of times go by before the whole thing switches out, and another moaning, strangely affecting Kid Cudi vocal arrives right along with Elton John’s piano for a bridge between “All Of The Lights” featuring Rihanna, and “All Of The Lights” featuring everybody in the world, ever. Once it changes over, Fergie provides an M.I.A-esque rap that’s far more political than anything M.I.A would rap (a nice, touching dose of female-oriented recession rap), and then back to Rihanna, before Tony Williams, John Legend, and maybe The-Dream, Ryan Leslie, and Cudi enter, and then Alicia Keys ends it with the kind of histrionic wail only she can sell and get away with. Somewhere, Elly Jackson from La Roux’s in there too.
In the midst of all this maximalist, beatmaker-as-conductor insanity, and right after the solipsistic “Power,” Kanye delivers some of his most down-to-earth and empathetic raps of his career. His verses on “All Of The Lights” aren’t polite, personal-political nods to people that aren’t Kanye West, he inhabits the voice of a dude whose problems are far more pressing than too much pussy and paparazzi. In the first verse, after a hilariously cruel memoriam to Michael Jackson (“our nigga dead.”), the Narrator races up stairs (the way the horns rise as he sings “I’m headed home, I’m almost there,” is like Odysseus back from sea) after a stint in prison, somehow expecting everything to be normal upon his return. But it isn’t: “To my surprise, a nigga replacing me.” Of course, he beats the shit out of the dude (“I had to take em’ to that ghetto university”).
Verse two continues this movie, and Kanye’s writing here is economic but very affecting and spot-on. The idea of having to meet at a Borders bookstore (so much less classy than Barnes & Noble) because the court’s ordered “public visitation” is funny and pathetic and gets at the degrading pathos that comes with divorce and being a fuck-up male in the American legal system. The Narrator is an abuser, but he’s trying, and this whole sequence of events really pains him because it’s emasculating, and also because he feels powerless in helping his daughter in any way other than handing his dough over to a wife that doesn’t give a fuck about him: “She need a daddy/Baby please, don’t let her grow up in that ghetto university.”
The empathy and complexity of this verse can’t be understated. At the risk of defending abusive husbands and absentee fathers, Kanye makes a quiet case for how and why these guys get to that point. Namely, that often, males are put in positions they never wanted to or expected themselves to be in and before they know it, they’re in jail, then out of jail, convinced shit will be fine. When it isn’t, and they’ve been replaced, they beat the fuck out of the new guy. Now, they’re spending an hour a week with their kid at a fucking Borders until they can prove they’re not a total piece of shit. It’s a rough cycle.
Fergie of all people, continues the empathetic conceit of Kanye’s raps, adopting the voice of a confused, job-less chick: “Unemployment line, credit card declined/Did i mention, I was about to lose my mind?/And was about to do that line?” Just as Kanye’s believable as the abusive, idiotic, means-well, ex-husband, is Fergie believable as a economically irresponsible, drug abuser. Maybe this is the “single black female addicted to retail” of “All Falls Down,” a few years later, with no job or money because the recession hit and credit card companies are a little less kind these days. In the middle of this wailing party track bubbling over with starpower, you get a portrait of two, all-too average American fuck-ups.
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