BY MATT BARONE |
WATCH: Kanye West and Steve McQueen's Nine-Minute, Single-Take Music Video
The ever-bold rapper teams up with the Oscar winner to challenge that infamous TRUE DETECTIVE sequence's edit-free ambition.
Depending on your tolerance for egotists and tweet-storms, you’ve either had enough of Kanye West at this point in the month or you’re still in Peak Kanye Fan Mode—there’s no middle ground when it comes to the aggressively outspoken rapper/producer/fashion designer/Twitter abuser. Along with the Tidal-only release of his new album, The Life of Pablo, West has been more ubiquitous than ever, though not in a necessarily good way. While he’s, per his own social-media-issued claims, $53 million in debt, West has reignited his "beef" (if you can really call it that) with Taylor Swift, started begging Mark Zuckerberg for money, been trolled by various fast food chains, possibly ticking off his almighty mother-in-law, and delivered a polarizing album that’s, among many other things, largely incoherent, occasionally audacious, lyrically pedestrian, definitely rushed, and mostly patched together and unfinished.
Indeed, February has been a whirlwind for Kanye, his supporters, and pretty much everyone who covers pop culture on a daily basis. Which is what makes his latest music video so unexpectedly refreshing. Last summer, West and Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to premiere their nine-minute, single-take clip for the rapper's tracks "All Day" and "I Feel Like That," neither of which made it onto the final The Life of Pablo tracklist. Shot in an empty Chatham Dockyard in , it's, according to West,” about "the gaze and the gaze following you"; in a time when West is putting himself out there with so much noise and self-aggrandized grandeur, the simplicity of “All Day/I Feel Like That” is a great antidote that should give West's haters, whether they're longstanding and newfound Yeezy cynics, a brief reason to root for the guy again.
And, if nothing else, it's a new Steve McQueen joint, which is never a bad thing. There's currently no embed code for the video, but, for now, head over to the London production house Unit Media’s official page to check it out. Be prepared for some technical glitches, however—perhaps in an effort to mirror the frustrating awfulness of Tidal’s functionality Unit Media’s stream has been spottier than an army of Dalmatians all morning.
If you can't get the link to work, here's a still from the video, just to, you know, prove that it does actually exist: