So now we're simulating necrophilia to get attention. Just when you think the bar can't get any lower, Kanye West drops a new single. And it's a Monster. Literally.
Here's all you need to know about the new Monster video: the first image is a pale, emaciated girl in her underwear and high heels, hanging by her neck, dead. Oh, and one more thing: the song that accompanies the image is a listless, lamebrain drone that doesn't have a single original or exciting idea.
I know I'm not the demographic Kanye's chasing. Monster is obviously aimed at twelve-year-old suburban boys with Mommy's money who think they're gangstas. The severed body parts and sexy corpses are West's way of being a god to middle schoolers. Monster is the equivalent of a horror movie, right in a pre-teen's wheelhouse. I get it.
The video begins with a disclaimer: "The following content is in no way to be interpreted as misogynistic or negative towards any groups of people. It is an art piece and it shall be taken as such." Yeah, right. It's art.
There's a word for a disclaimer like this: gutless. Either take responsibility for this travesty, or don't release it. That goes for Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Bon Iver and Rick Ross, West's partners in jadedness.
News Flash 1: Just because you say something isn't misogynistic doesn't make it true. How about we ask some women to make that call, not a pathologically self-involved hip hop "artist."
What slams my meter into the red is that Monster is a boring, pointless and desperate video that thinks depicting cadaverous, nearly naked women is cool. Alice Cooper did this forty years ago, and never took it as seriously as West seems to. I also get chapped that someone in the 21st Century still thinks blasting profanity makes you "dangerous." News Flash 2: Redd Foxx—in his other life as a foul-mouthed comedian before Sanford and Son—did this kind of stuff in the 1940s. At least he was funny.
Worst of all, for all its attempts to be shocking, Monster just lays there as lifeless as one of its fashion-model carcasses. It's not sexy, it's not scary, it's just brain-dead stupid.
I was about give it up and confess that, yes, I'm a prude. Until I looked up the definition. People today think a "prude" is someone who is excessively proper or modest, and that doesn't exactly describe me.
The original word for "prude" comes from the French—a notoriously prudish nation, as we all know—and the word originally meant "worthy" or "respectable." On second glance, maybe that is me, or at least the way I try to be.
I love people who push the envelope and amp up the creativity. Sorry, Kanye, today that isn't you.
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