Kanye West debuted the video for “Life of Pablo” track “Fade” at Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards. The video was met with one resounding response from fans and critics alike: What’s the deal with that sexy cat-lady?
For the majority of the three-minute, 45-second video, viewers ogle the oiled up bod of bananas beautiful Teyana Taylor as she danced “Flashdance”-style around a retro gymnasium. Toward the end, she hops into the shower with her real-life partner Iman Shumpert of the Cleveland Cavaliers, where they proceed to love on each other in the most private of spaces in the most public of ways.
But the real kicker comes about 15 seconds from the end, when Taylor poses nude alongside her man. Only, she’s been transformed into some kind of cat-woman hybrid. The newly animorphed babe and her beau stare intensely into the camera as it pans out to reveal a flock of white sheep, and also a baby. Suddenly, we’re looking at a strangely sexual family pastoral, all in the video’s original retro-kitsch gym environment.
Since the video’s release, reddit has been abuzz with potential fan theories behind the bizarre catwoman. Is she an embodiment of female objectification ― a woman literally turned into a pussy? Is the scene a modern day riff on a biblical prophecy: “The ‘lion and the lamb shall lay down together”? Is Kanye just pulling an absurdist, emo middle-schooler move here, telling the masses they’re all sheep?
For most of “Fade,” Kanye feeds us a familiar fantasy, which we eagerly gobble up. First there’s a gorgeous woman dancing like a warrior goddess, then a very beautiful couple getting it on. We know these images, we’ve seen them before ― in art, in film, in advertising, in our imaginations, in our dreams.
And then, right at the end, for only an instant, Kanye throws in a wild card. Something at once delicious and disturbing flashes across the screen, so briefly that before you can digest what it is and what it means, it’s gone.
Taylor’s cat face is pure camp ― part Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” part Broadway’s “Cats,” part the utterly bizarre 1980s television series “Beauty and the Beast.” And yet plenty of artistic references come to mind, as well. Will Cotton’s sugary visions of Katy Perry floating atop the clouds, Jeff Koons’ wonderfully unsettling golden sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Deana Lawson’s stunning photo of unclothed black bodies staring straight into the camera.
Here, as with 2013’s “Bound 2,” Kanye toys with visuals typically associated with low production value and bad taste, mutating them into the stuff of high art. Fame, of course, is the weapon that makes this possible, the power that transforms anything Kanye touches ― no matter how ugly, inane, or bizarre ― into something worth seeing, something worth dreaming about.
In his review of “Bound 2,” art critic Jerry Saltz dubbed the term “The New Uncanny” to describe Kanye’s aesthetic, in which artifice, camp, prestige and sheer will are used to create something genuine, ambitious and completely discombobulating. “The New Uncanny is un-self-consciousness filtered through hyper-self-consciousness, unprocessed absurdity, grandiosity of desire, and fantastic self-regard,” Saltz wrote.
As Saltz notes, fame isn’t only Kanye’s reward, it’s his most successful medium. He performs his fame and in doing so, becomes less of a human and more of an an artwork, a symbol, even a religious figure. It’s hard to look at Taylor and Shumpert, bodies pressed together, without immediately thinking of Kim K and Kanye bouncing gleefully atop his motorcycle. In this gloriously cheesy landscape, Kimye are of this world and also, with Kim’s alien nipple-less breasts, outside of it.
Another image that comes to mind, however, is Jeff Koons’ 1991 hyperrealist painting series, “Made in Heaven,” in which the artist ― also proficient in performing fame ― painted himself and his then-wife Cicciolina having sex. Like Kanye, Koons wholeheartedly praises the tacky and trashy as beautiful and pure. For both, bodies are best oiled up and exaggerated, midway between real life and cartoon.
Few women embody this state of being more than, of course, Kim Kardashian West, as well as her family. Famous first and foremost for performing their daily lives, the Kardashian women have slowly transformed their physical selves, inviting captivated fans from around the world to follow suit, through Kim’s favorite waist-training corset or Kylie’s lip kits. The Kardashians slowly evolve to resemble Kim’s airbrushed automaton in “Bound 2,” and we viewers take note.
When Kylie first debuted her new, plumped-up lips, the public deemed the look fake, overdone, strange, too much. Now, however, her brand of lipsticks are virtually always sold out, her pout is what we desire to emulate, a beauty that even nature can’t compete with. The Kardashians themselves live out Kanye’s foremost motto: that fame creates art creates beauty, that what’s campy and dumb and fake can, in the right hands, possess extraordinary meaning and value.
Taylor as Catwoman is Kim gone a step further, a step stranger, a step darker. Is it too much? Maybe for now. But Kanye has shown us his ability to shape our tastes, our cultural norms, even our sexual desires before. He has successfully infiltrated our perceptions and invaded our cultural imagination.
With “Fade,” Kanye gives us what we want and takes us a step farther, introducing us to beautiful, dark, twisted fantasies we didn’t even know we had. Get ready for the Kardashian Kat Kit, coming at you in 2018.
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