I was able to catch the new Kanye West x Steve McQueen video, “All Day/I Feel Like That”, today at LACMA. Today was the last showing at the museum, but there is no word on it yet as to whether he will release it in the future. Here’s to hoping he does. The first impression as I walked into the big hall were the 4 huge speakers in each corner of the room, then a screen coming down straight through the middle of the room with the video playing on both sides. The first time I saw the video, I was right in front of the speakers, so “All Day” and “I Feel Like That” were blasting into my ears. I had a slight angle, but I could feel the emotion in the latter track, which is the first time I had heard it, and it should also be in SWISH. Then as the video ended, I moved to the middle of the hall, with a perfect view of the screen. The music, of course, was great, but the film that accompanied was on par and added a lot of feeling to the songs. The film was shot in one continuous take for 9 minutes, and Kanye is in every second of it. In the beginning, we see Kanye in an abandoned warehouse, with four speakers on each corner, similar to the room we were in. The video is described as playing “upon the relationship between the camera and the subject”, and that is very evident as the film goes along. For “All Day”, we see Ye wildin’ out, similar to his live performances of the track, while the camera stays with him the whole way, sort of like a cat and mouse game, where sometimes, Kanye will be ahead of the camera while it is trying to catch up and other times the camera is facing another direction and Ye is trying to stay in front of it. Towards the end of “All Day”, it gets very intimate, to the point of where we can hear him breathing heavily as he is sitting down on the floor. Then, “I Feel Like That” begins, and we really get to see Kanye up close and personal while the camera stays focused on him and the lyrics, which shows him connecting to the common person and showing us that he experiences the same painful feelings as all human beings, play in the background. “I feel like that all the time.” The camera then pans out as we see Kanye alone in the warehouse, lying on the ground.
