Kanye West Premieres Beautiful “Runaway” Short Film (Exclusive Coverage)

Kanye West is every bit as complex and often contradictory in person as he is in his music. As he stood in front of the assembled crowd for the exclusive premiere of his "Runaway" short film in L.A. last night, he said that he deeply regretted the Taylor Swift incident, and then moments later, almost in spite of himself, insisted that he was completely right to interrupt her: "When you spend your whole life looking for that right note, and then you hear a glaringly wrong note, and you hear it year after year after year...." Minutes later, shortly after detailing the six months he spend in Rome studying fashion, he said that since he had nothing, was broken down to nothing, over the last year, he no longer gives a fuck what anyone thinks as he makes his new album "Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy".

(Note: If six months in Rome is "nothing", that's a nothing I'd like to have, and he absolutely did care, deeply, about what people thought of "Runaway".)

At turns egotistical and humble, bold and vulnerable, distant and warmly inviting, these are the qualities that have made him our generation's hip-hop genius, and our generation's most controversial and enigmatic musician. It's only right then that "Runaway" falters at times because he believes a little too strongly in his directing abilities, but it is ultimately, like all of his albums, a work of staggering creativity and boundary defying brilliance.

To be fair, Kanye's a wooden and forced actor, but thankfully his moments of dialogue are kept to a minimum and he and collaborator Hype Williams concentrate on creating what are, undeniably, stunningly beautiful visuals. I wish I could provide more details, but apparently Kanye has learned his lesson about leaks and security to see the film was tighter than a presidential appearance. I was frisked three separate times, and while the imposing men manning the theatre wouldn't have blinked if I had a sawed-off shotgun taped to me leg, they made it abundantly clear that anyone with a camera, cellphone or anything else that could even remotely take a picture or video would be headlocked and tossed. So instead you'll have to trust me when I say take the trailer, expand to 40 minutes, put it on the big screen, and you still won't have any idea how dope "Runaway" looks.



Kanye explained that he always regretted that some of his favorite songs never got made into videos because they weren't singles, so he wanted to use "Runaway" as a chance to have some of the new album's music accompanied visually. The film then is really a series of short music videos loosely tied together with a plot, but as long as we're here, I can sum up the "plot" pretty quickly: Kanye's driving through the forest of an unknown European country (France?), a meteor strikes the road in front of him and he discovers a phoenix (a.k.a. a mostly naked Selita Ebanks), which he takes home, fucks and teaches the ways of the modern world before she leaves him to rejoin her world. Yep, that pretty much sums it up.

While the film will undoubtedly inspire no shortage of man-bird love jokes when it finally hits the masses, the real lessons I took away from last night was that Kanye's continuing to do things no rapper has ever done, and that "Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" sounds like another classic. In addition to the full version of "Runaway", we heard segments of five to six other songs, and I can't front, they were all dope. Kanye's returned to his rap roots on the mic and behind the boards, but has brought along some of the electronic experimentation from his "808s & Heartbreaks" days, creating a hybrid that simultaneously bangs and soars.

Prepare for the hip-hop world to shake once again on November 22. Kanye's going to run away with this shit.