The first song of the album MBDTF, to the horn melody from the Rocky movies, is titled "Turn on the Lights". This light that Kanye is talking about invokes stadium lights, concert hall lights, club lights perhaps, but most importantly is the light that Kanye invokes of the reader as he turns the lights onto himself. Kanye is exposing the "twisted" "dark" and consequently the "beautiful" parts of his own fantasy, or of himself. Ye wants us to see him, all of him. His album is in many ways a confessional.
My favorite poem of Elizabeth Bishop's (at the moment) is "The Man-Moth". The Man-Moth is a Promethean monster that crawls from the underground and scales buildings to reach the moon. To the Man-Moth, the moon is a hold in the canvas of the sky. He wants to escape the night. The Man-Moth never reaches the moon, his escape, and is disappointed every time he fails...but not as disappointed as he would be had he reached it. The final stanza reads as follows:
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
Exposing the monster creature to light reveals his tears, which for the careful observer are "pure enough to drink". These are the lights that Kanye begs his readers/listeners to hold up to his own eye. In so doing, we may see the "beautiful" in his dark, twisted fantasy. A rough or controversial outer image is only a facade. It is a filtering process, asking only the attentive to receive the confessional honesty of his poetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment