Begrudgingly keeping up with the Kanye has proven to be a constant effort, one that requires more than a mere eye on his events — including the forthcoming August 26 event — but also a considered evaluation of the surrounding circumstances. That approach again proves necessary when weighing in on the latest slew of posts uploaded to Kanye’s Instagram without context.
All of the new bits come after this weekend’s noxious uploads and thankfully are baggage-free. Two more straightforward posts include a gallery of Kanye walking back and forth in clothing he was seen wearing in Los Angeles and a snap of one of his now-signature masks draped on the ground.
Pretty surface-level stuff, typical for today’s Ye Posting. Speaking of, it’s probably notable that Kanye has all but abandoned Twitter in favor of Instagram, for now.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CS6X4BqN8Jo/
More interestingly, there are two photos that require deeper study, not including the whited-out image of a house that Kanye uploaded on Friday. The first is a black-and-white photograph sourced from the book Modern Primitives showing a ’20s/’30s-era tattoo of The Rock of Ages, clearly a nod to Kanye’s own religion.
The piece was done by Percy Walters, an enterprising inventor who created a variety of pioneering tattoo machines and was a gifted tattoo artist in his own right.
https://youtu.be/fqFdW7vFMac
Then, there’s a blurry image that ought to look familiar to Oneohtrix Point Never fans. It’s a screengrab from Georges Schwizgebel’s 1982 animated short film, Le ravissement de Frank N. Stein (The Ravishing of Frank N. Stein
), which inspired OPN’s album cover for R Plus Seven and probably some of his musical output, too.
Its eerie soundtrack comes courtesy of composers Michael Horowitz and Rainer Boesch, who created a gurgly soundtrack of electronic warbling to match Schwizgebel’s stunning painted backdrops. Some critics have compared Le ravissement de Frank N. Stein‘s endless hallways and dreamlike atmosphere to Chirico; I felt a little bit of Martin Arnold in there, myself, due to the tense repetition.
Like so many of Kanye’s recent moves, it’s not entirely clear what these means about himself, DONDA, or otherwise. One could juxtapose the film’s empty spaces against Kanye’s home (or the stadiums he’s been living in), the lurching monsters to Kanye’s mental state, and even the penultimate action — the rejection of Frankenstein’s monster by his would-be spouse — to Kanye’s own marital issues.
Or, maybe, Kanye just liked the colors and shapes in that particular screengrab.
There’s a lot of meat on the bone but, like the DONDA release dates, best to avoid getting too attached to any particular interpretation.