Kanye West "Monster" Video Music Review

Kanye West "Monster"

Video Music Review

By our guest blogger, Nick Hanover

Even though the only version that's available at the moment is a poorly rendered, dirty leak of the upcoming video, Kanye West's "Monster" is something to behold. The album track was powerful enough before but with the unsettling visuals it's on a whole other level, a psychologically horrifying take on the song itself that reads quite a bit into West's love-hate relationship with fame and glamor.

West has always had a knack for visuals, working with uniformly excellent directors to create videos that are complimentary to not just his tracks but his image as a whole. Since West has stated numerous times that his goal is to be the new Michael Jackson, it makes sense that he'd be such a perfectionist in the video format as well, given how big of a role that played in Jackson's success.

Looking like a music video directed by George Romero with cinematography by Terry Richardson, "Monster" seems to equate glamor, or at least modeling, with lifelessness, with West at one point even using two (unconscious? dead?) models in bed with him like one would use mannequins. The fans play the roles of the zombies, beating at the door of West's estate, literally begging for a piece of him and feeding on his hangers-on.

Nicki Minaj, like on the track itself, steals the show, though, playing both the captor and the victim in a sequence that looks like Audition if it were a BDSM porno. The direction is note perfect, brilliantly depicting Minaj's already intensely dissociative verse and emphasizing the contrasts in her personality and style. Where Kanye and Jay-Z are coolly detached from their surroundings and situations, Minaj is a freak on a leash, ready to be let loose and wreak havoc on friend and foe alike.

He may have intended to make his own version of "Thriller" with "Monster," but West has accomplished even more than that. "Monster" is sexy, scary and unsettling all at once--it's a genius update on the skeletal remains of the last King of Pop.

View the video below. What are your thoughts?