Love Lockdown

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- "What could be more comforting or more rich with malice?"

Rapper, singer, and self-confessed spectacle Kanye West claimed in a recent interview that his video for 'Love Lockdown' took its inspiration from Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho. "You know at the end of the movie he didn't really kill anyone," he is careful to remind us. "[I just liked] the clean aesthetic and the way he was all about labels. I wanted to express all of that in the video." Unsurprisingly, his description elides an important aspect of the protagonist Patrick Bateman's character: his love affair with music of the most banal kind. Favourite artists include Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, and Whitney Houston. Perhaps you have seen the film? Bateman kills two prostitutes in his apartment to the warblings of Houston's 'The Greatest Love of All'.

Of course, Bateman's actions (whether real or imagined) taint these songs. They speak now of the attempted repression of carnal and violent desires; their visible absence cannot be smothered with smooth grooves and comfortable clichés. This reminds me of something that the psychoanalytic theorist Slavjov Zizek says in his Pervert's Guide to the Cinema: "All work is cleaning up". He illustrates the aphorism with the wonderful scene from Hitchcock's Psycho in which the murderer Norman Bates dedicates more than ten minutes to mopping Marion Crane's blood from the bathroom floor. I wonder what is undone by the bleachy-clean quality of Kanye's work? Both song and video are devoid of all mess and clutter; even the voice is put through an electronic filter lest an all-too-human inflection burst forth.

But what of the tribal warriors? Representative of Kanye's libido perhaps - it is a love lock-down, after all. Don't they shatter the sanitized mirage? Yet even these are rather benign. Ethnicity is lost with browns, oranges and yellows; only artificial colours, neons, are permitted, and then only towards the end. The high contrast abstracts real human fleshiness and makes the figures appear coldly androgynous. A similar technique has been used in Beyonce's recent video 'Single Ladies (put a ring on it)'. The colour is held back, as the diva holds back from her deserting cad of a lover. Rather than screaming sexuality, it whispers refusal and restraint. Yet should we criticize Kanye because we find little horror in his heart of darkness (as presented to us in this video)?

The video's benign character may be a nostalgic comment on a past Kanye has recently deserted. In his new album he exchanges rapping for singing. Abandoning rap, he simultaneously throws off an image that has tended to be (whether wrongly or not) connoted with – to pinch Aesop Rock's phrase – 'Fast Cars, Danger, Fire, and Knives'. It is partly because the irony of such songs is so popularly recognized that the 'bad-boy' image had to be deserted. But we might also consider the success factor. What is the image's relevance for a musician who has achieved such staggering popular acclaim? He can mince around in his Ikea kitchen all he likes, chopping onions with his stainless steel knife, provided he makes good music.

Black and white often signifies the past (see The White Stripes 'My Doorbell'). Yet the black-and-white of 'Love Lockdown' also points towards the future (the white is too bright to be achieved by natural means: it is both engineered and expensive). The future before us is a haunted one. There is nothing to mark any idiosyncracy in Kanye's room: no small trinket to make it 'home'. What is more Kanye has lost his voice to the machine. Here, I think, is the death in Kanye's video. Where Snoop Dogg raps wryly of a tired but still performed identity in his similar video 'Drop it Like It's Hot' -"I'm a gangsta, but y'all knew that/ Da Big Boss Dogg, yeah I had to do that" - Kanye is more cut-throat. A worrying pointer towards what happens once the past is abandoned? A metaphor for what happened to us perhaps? Maybe this warning should go to Hengist 1.