Kanye West surprised the world on Tuesday with a new music video for "Bound 2," the third video from his album "Yeezus," for which he is currently on tour. That the song's debut was made on Ellen DeGeneres's talk show "Ellen" should probably be an indication that the Yeezus video would be..."off brand," as Gawker's Rich Juzwiak put it. West ditched his hard edge and instead rode on a motorcylce, carefree with his topless fiancee Kim Kardashian against cascading Western landscapes. One West-like thing West managed to do, however, was keep the media talking about him. Critics are still processing the bizarre video:
"West may have pushed this one right past the precipice of self-parody, straight over the edge."
-Eric Levenson, The Atlantic Wire
"It's like the scene from Anchorman when Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone go to 'Pleasuretown' and ride on unicorns on rainbows, minus any sense of self-awareness. Or clothes for Kim."
-Eric Levenson, The Atlantic Wire
"It sort of looks like what would happen if you mixed the horse equivalent of that ironic howling wolf t-shirt with the Yosemite background on the MacBook PhotoBooth app, in a conceptual fashion manner."
-Callie Beusman, Jezebel
"Rainbow waterfalls of cheesiness, cascading over unicorns. I have to believe Kanye thought there was something funny about making his video a slightly more NSFW version of a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper, but who knows. Love makes people do silly things."
-Forrest Wickman, Slate
"It has all the class of one of those karaoke videos you'd pay $10 to make at a Six Flags park or on a boardwalk in the late '80s. It appears to be wholly unknowing regarding its own cheesiness."
-Rich Juzwiak, Gawker
"There are shades of Aerosmith’s fantastic music video for 'Amazing' here, which boasted Alicia Silverstone engaging in a heavy makeout session with Jeremy London on a bike."
-Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast
But maybe all of the critics are wrong. Maybe "Bound 2" is, as BuzzFeed's Myles Tanzer puts it,"The Most Pure Expression Of Love Ever"?
Well, we'll see about that.
Shares