A Time Lapse Project

POWER (sic transit gloria Kanye)At some point in the tenth or eleventh grade, virtually every high school student in America studies a unit on the great Romantic poets. Bundled in countless anthologies with Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale," Wordsworth's “Daffodils,” and Byron's “She Walks in Beauty," Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ozymandias” is one of those poems that can feel like the drably comforting wallpaper in your grandmother's upstairs bathroom - an index of the unnoticed and the overfamiliar. This is a shame, because “Ozymandias” is easily one of the weirdest, most penetrating meditations on the tragedy of human egotism ever produced. The poem: OzymandiasI met a traveler from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."Nothing beside remains — in those three words floats the ancient lump in humanity's throat, the world's singular fact. Nothing lasts, life is fleeting, sic transit gloria mundi — thus passes the glory of the world. The poet's voice is not condescending or didactic or full of the sort of unctuousness an elder sibling might savor while ruining the Santa Claus myth for a little sister. No, the voice is numb, flattened by the awe of escaping everyday busyness long enough to fully engage the ultimate fact. You can imagine the voice narrating his encounter on a street corner to no one in particular, a man lost in the most existential sense who must remain inside the poem to survive its truth. The voice belongs equally to a grandmother on her deathbed who shares the story with a favorite grandchild, a bitterly won nugget of final wisdom to be cherished alone, later, in a private place. That the average high school student learns “Ozymandias” as a simple moral takeaway, a souvenir to be tucked away somewhere and then forgotten, is tremendously unfortunate. More than a reflection on the triumph of entropy or the brevity of life, the poem is about how fantastically sad it is to be a human being, a creature given an ego — a miracle tool capable of devising the most intricate and ornately ambitious projects - with a built-in awareness of its own futility. Anyone who reads the poem with an eye toward having a laugh at the vanquished king's expense (“What an asshole! Boy oh boy was he wrong in the end!“) is already a piece of that “shattered visage,“ an ironic accomplice to his own ignorance. We resent hubris on the level of Ozymandias' at our own peril, because his wasted empire instantiates our own lives. The poem is about power, certainly, but it is about power in a very particular way — the unique and definitively human tragedy of possessing both power (self—aware vitality) and the certainty of its demise (senescence and death). Shelley's compassion for humanity in “Ozymandias” is neither melodramatic nor insincere; it is infinite, a transcendent wind that will blow and stir the sands of our beautiful ruins forever If we are paying attention, we know that “Ozymandias” is always a part of contemporary life in one form or another. While in office George Bush unwittingly nodded to it during an interview with Bob Woodward, responding to the question of how history will view the war in Iraq. As Woodward shared with 60 Minutes while promoting his 2007 book Plan of Attack: “And [Bush] said, 'History,' and then he took his hands out of his pocket[s] and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said. 'History, we don't know. We'll all be dead.'" The Flaming Lips in 2002 released the song “Do You Realize??" - a pop hymn of humility and ultimate perspective amid the void, with earnest lyrics about death and human smallness — and it became one of their most widely known and beloved cuts. More recently, serialized TV masterpiece Breaking Bad confronted the poem head on in a July 2013 advertisement for the show's final eight episodes. A series of time-lapse shots depicting New Mexico's scarred expanse is overlaid with the voice of Bryan Cranston's meth emperor Walter White. He recites “Ozymandias” in a detached voice that passes over a slow and barely audible thud in the background, a discomfiting sound that feels like the final stone beatings of the ravaged king's heart It should come as no surprise, then, that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — a record about the transformative decadence of a fully indulgent ego — also engages the poem's legacy, though through the prism of Kanye's narcissism. “POWER” is a twenty-first century rendition of “Ozymandias” as told from the king's point of view, at the summit of his reign. Where the speaker in Shelley's poem depended on a chance encounter with a traveler to learn the awful irony of Ozymandias, millennia after the end of his rule, we don't have to wait that long. This is the age of on-demand-everything-right-this-minute, and “POWER” is a song about Kanye's self-conscious delusion of omnipotence, a fantasy too aware of its own extravagance not to come undone. The track is a wrecking ball of egotism that, by song's end, has toppled the Ozymandias statue it just helped erect A brief pause here to look at Kanye's two official visual representations of “POWER” is useful, because both get at something fundamental to the music. The first comes early in his Runaway film. During the “Gorgeous” sequence — in which a pensive, furrowed-brow Griffin observes the phoenix lost in wonder among the menagerie of animals in his back yard — we get a snapshot of the film‘s symbology, with Griffin our proxy for overburdened, self-serious Kanye and the phoenix a token of his fenced-in creative purity. Hard cut to a shot of Griffin making love to an MPC2OOOXL machine, his fingertips massaging the chopped sample of Continent Number 6's “Afromerica” into the primitive tribal wail that pulsates throughout “POWER.” The improvised hook he creates on his device casts an incantatory spell over the phoenix, who gives herself bodily to the beat, a spellbound cobra in thrall to the master’s charms. The sexual self-aggrandizement here is palpable, which is precisely the point. At his finest, Kanye is hip-hop's most soulful practitioner, a shaman who communes with the samples he channels and the beats he conjures. His sonic collages have a boastful physicality, and in this scene we get to witness an erotic dramatization of his music's allure and — yes - its power over the listener The other significant visual rendering of“POWER" comes courtesy of Marco Brambilla, the renowned video collagist whose works of eschatological excess pack multiple filmed images into the space of a single frame. As reported in 2010 by Dave Itzkoff on the New York Times Arts Beat blog, Kanye was inspired to collaborate with Brambilla on the music video for “POWER” after seeing his installation Civilization hanging in the elevators of the Standard hotel in New York. A motion picture collage of looped images derived from hundreds of different films, Civilization reenacts Dante's Divine Comedy with gaudy pop referents like Arnold Schwarzenegger peopling the spaces of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Brambilla was quoted by Jori Finkel in a 2011 Los Angeles Times profile describing the painterly quality of his work: “It's like I‘m making a video canvas where the brushstrokes are loops or samples taken from film." Like the collaborations with Murakami and Condo on album covers, Brambilla's “POWER“ video ventriloquizes the raw aesthetic drive of Kanye's music in the language of visual art. As Itzkoff describes the video: “Mr. West is seen standing imposingly with a heavy chain around his neck. As Mr. West raps, the camera slowly zooms out in one continuous, unedited take to reveal him in a classical structure, surrounded by female attendants who are partly or entirely nude; some kneel before him on all fours, others wear devil horns and still others are suspended upside down from the ceiling. The sword of Damocles hangs precariously over Mr. West's head, and behind him an unseen executioner is preparing to strike him with a blade." The video is a stunning work, a “moving painting" (as Kanye tweeted) that Brambilla described to the Times as “his and [Kanye]'s attempt to answer the question, “How do you visually paint a portrait of power?” The further out the camera slowly zooms, the more clearly we see how imperiled Kanye's Ozymandias figure is, how suffocated by decadence, how threatened by his own narcissistic illusions. Notably. the figure of Kanye — at the center of the painting, naturally — is stony, proud, unmoving He looks like a statue. "POWER" opens without warning, layering the sampled hook of an obscure 1978 French disco song (“Afromerica" by Continent Number 6) to pave the way for pop music's Ozymandias. A sudden staccato eruption of clapping hands and atavistic chanting creates a sensation of worship, and as the first verse begins, Kanye locates himself in the pantheon of history — a self-proclaimed superhero for the twenty-first century — while a piercing tornado siren howls in the background. The rolling tank tread of a beat comes in at twenty-four seconds, sampling elements of funk act Cold Grits' song “It's Your Thing" (a cover of the 1969 smash hit by the Isley Brothers). A martial fury drives the song forward, Kanye's ego mobilized and on the march to wage war against. . .what, exactly? The easy response is to say that "POWER" was the first single from MBDTF and, as such, needed to be a shot across the bow, an unambiguous announcement of his return. The second verse bolsters this idea, taking aim at the cast of Saturday Night Live (and, by extension, the American audience) for mocking him after the Taylor Swift incident. He gives a brief account of the impulse behind his self—exile to Hawaii before delivering the song's version of Shelley's pedestal inscription, a metaphorical custody battle with Reality for his creatively unbound “inner child.” This Ozymandias doesn’t ask us to look upon his works and despair — he does it himself. The innermost contradiction that makes Kanye who he is, the one that makes him both a great artist and a great boor, is his overindulgence of everything childish within himself. The “custody” lyric evokes images of warring adults, and Kanye becomes one of them in his fight to maintain dominion over his empire of creative egotism. The implosive pressure is enormous, enough to push this Ozymandias toward thoughts of taking his own life with a sparkling handgun. The song's hook expresses profound doubts about even being Ozymandias at all and then stamps a sonic exclamation point on the whole affair with a sampled quote from the eponymous King Crimson song. The line punctuates the new Ozymandias epitaph for the digital era: "My name is Ozymandias, 21st century schizoid man. Join me in looking upon my works and despairing." The plagued Ozymandias of “POWER” seeks to avoid the inevitability of decay by redefining power. He isn't asking us to tremble at the sight of his empire, he's trying to convince us (unsuccessfully) that he doesn't care about its legacy. He tries to define power as the will to acquiesce at the moment of triumph, but no one is buying it. This is pop music's poet of narcissism, after all. A question he poses in the song's outro (“You got the power to let power go?”) comes as part of a generic suicide fantasy (another ventriloquist act via collaborator Dwele) — a last—ditch effort to somehow elide the fate of all kings. The fantasy ends with the song, though, and Kanye wakes with a terrible hangover on a bed lined with softest Egyptian sheets.