God, we loathe Kanye West with each growing day. The StuffThatWhitePeopleLove rapper’s new video for “Love Lockdown” (that godawful song he played at the MTV Music Video Awards in September) apparently apes the style and clean aesthetics of Christian Bale/Patrick Bateman’s apartment in the film, “American Psycho.”
It’s funny for two reasons. One: the ‘Psycho’ minimalist look (that Kanye adores) is that way by fortutious default. Yes, it helps out Bale’s meticulous character who’s all about well-crafted business cards and and thusly-tailored Armani three-piece suits, but the Mary Harron-directed film was brutally budget and still to this day stands out as one of the most cheaply-dressed set designed films in the longstanding memory. Watch for it next time, it’s that bad.
Secondly: As West is wont to do, he completely misses the point. “You know at the end of the movie [that] he didn’t really kill anyone. [I just liked] the clean aesthetic and the way he was all about labels. I wanted to express all of that in the video,” he told MTV. Wow, shit’s deep, right?
Oh yeah, all about the labels! Let’s all endorse a shallow consumerism that is so pathological it begets an antisocial personality disorder that may or may not border on homicidal tendencies. Ugh, but to be expected. Kanye is afterall, a guy who thinks that Connect Four is as difficult as chess, so yeah, not the brightest star in the sky. Somewhere in Manhattan, Bret Easton Ellis is loving the irony. [Image Idolator/MTV]
I think you’re being very unfair to both Kanye, and the set designer of “American Psycho”.
Keep up the good work otherwise.