Dissect - S2E7 – All of the Lights by Kanye West

Episode Date: September 12, 2017

We continue our serialized analysis of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by dissecting "All Of The Lights." Follow Dissect on social media @dissectpodcast. Purchase Dissect merch at dissectpodcast.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Dissect, long-form musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes. I'm your host, Kolkushna. Today, we continue our serialized examination of Kanye West, my beautiful, dark-twisted fantasy. On our last episode, we dissected the album's third track, Power, a kind of psychoanalysis on the concept of power, an exploration of Kanye's relationship to celebrity and fame. Due to the inherent pressure and fears of power, we heard Kanye's self-aggrandizing egotism,

decay over the course of the song, which concludes with Kanye fantasizing about his own suicide. In many ways, this imagined suicide marks the end of the album's large-scale introduction. On Dark Fantasy, Gorgeous and Power, Kanye establishes a witty, wealthy, erratic, somewhat reckless character who's struggling with his relationship to fame, the fear of losing his creativity, escapism through drugs and women, and perhaps most of all, an internal confliction of of self. He shared his youthful conceit on dark fantasy, shown moments of social observational brilliance on songs like Gorgeous, while also revealing a troubled and haunted psyche on power. He alludes to escapeism through sex, drugs, and materialism throughout all of these songs, and mentions more than a few

times the devil that seems to be forever around the corner. We get the impression that Kanye is dealing with an abundance of emotional and psychological distress, and his fantasized death at the end of power is at once tragic and liberating. The music we hear directly after the end of power is, well, funereal. And let's ask ourselves, what happens immediately after death? We supposedly see a bright light, don't we? Well, then it would be no coincidence that this funereal interlude acts as a bridge into another world. The subject of today's episode, All of the Lights. All of the Lights is produced by Kanye West and Jeff Basker. Kanye has stated that All of the Lights is one of his greatest musical accomplishments, and it's not difficult to understand why. The track contains an extensive

orchestral instrumentation, including French horns, trumpets, flute, violins, violas, cello, keyboards, piano, bass, extremely intricate drum programming, not to mention the 14 high-profile guest vocalists, Alicia Keys, John Legend, The Dream, Drake, Fergie, Kid Cuddy, Elton John, Charlie Wilson, Tony Williams, Ellie Jackson, Alvin Fields, Ken Lewis, and Rihanna. Its decadence and beauty brims on the brink of chaos, as if just one more percussive hit would send the whole thing crashing to the ground. The transition from the end of power, the chamber music interlude, to all of the lights, is personally one of my favorite moments on the album experience. I always hear it as a portal to another world. The Kanye character established throughout the first three

tracks has perhaps died some kind of spiritual or metaphoric death, and now he'll begin to pull back the curtain and reveal to us the fantastic, dark and twisted recesses of his psyche. The brief musical interlude features cello by Chris Charny and piano by Elton John. The musical material is adapted from all the lights, but is slowed down and embellished to be perhaps unrecognizable to some. I'd like to take a moment to display just how this interlude was adapted and transformed from all the lights, as I feel it displays Kanye's intuitive gift of instrumentation, and in this case, orchestration. The opening of the interlude features a melody played by both cello and piano, while the piano also provides a harmonic accompaniment.

For clarity sake, I'm going to play just the melody as simply as possible on the piano without accompaniment. With that fresh in your ears, let's hear the introduction of all the lights. The melody first played on cello and piano is now played by a brass section. The melody is altered rhythmically, with sharp staccato notes interspersed in the horn version, where they are played long and sustained on the cello in the interlude. Let's hear both versions back to back on the piano alone. First the sustained cello version followed directly by the staccato horn version. Now let's hear those two versions played simultaneously.

Compositionally, these two versions follow the same melodic arc, yet contain two different emotional qualities due to the instrumentation, rhythmic alteration, and articulation adjustments. A similar phenomenon occurs with the interlude's second section. Now that same section on all the lights. Do your best to ignore the vocal part and concentrate solely on the horns. And again, extra bright, I want you all to see this. Turn up the lights in here, baby.

Want you to see everything. Want you to see. And again, let's hear these two versions played back-to-back on piano alone. And now played on top of each other. It's the same effect as the first section. Intramentation, rhythm, and articulation changed the emotional quality of the otherwise synonymous melodies. This is artistic flex at its finest.

The best musicians and composers, are able to bend melodies and harmonies to their expressive will, exhibiting total control of their emotional sonic palate, limitless and their expressive power. The All of the Lights interlude is a somber, weeping, melancholic dirge, while the full-length track is a declarative fanfare fit for a king. It's a sonic exemplification of the fragility of power, the duality of our perception of fame,

and its dark reality seen in an experience only by those living with it. This dichotomy was also expressed on both dark fantasy, and power, and as the album progresses, the dark twisted side of this dichotomy will come into focus much more, until it's nearly all we can see. Let's listen again to the concluding moments of the interlude, followed directly by the opening moments of all the lights. After the somber conclusion of the interlude, the opening exclamation of the phrase, all of the lights, is like the flipping of a switch, a switch controlling something like the neon lights of the Las Vegas strip.

After the fanfare horns and tone the track with royalty and grandeur, Rihanna performs an opening hook. Rihanna sings, turn up the lights in here, extra bright I want y'all to see this. Here at the beginning, in frame within the song's massive pulsating sonic architecture, these lyrics are a bit ambiguous. We might wonder if she's talking about having sex with the lights on, with the line, I want y'all to see this being her body. A bit of clarity comes with the closing line, you know what I need, want you to see all of the lights. It's the lights themselves she wants us to see, not so much what they illuminate.

It's an interesting image, as we imagine looking directly into a display of lights and the blinding after effect it causes. This, combined with the blinding fury of the music behind her, is starting to paint a subtle picture of what the song is really about, the reality of fame. Rihanna, who becomes yet another surrogate narrator of Kanye's story, is here to shine the bright lights on the dark side of celebrity. After this opening hook, a unique post-hook or bridge is performed by Rihanna and Ellie Jackson. This post-hook section, which is performed only this one time, begins Fast Cars, Shooting Stars, All of the Lights, until it's Vegas everywhere we are. Fast Cars invokes an image of celebrity lifestyle,

but also calls the mind the emptiness of material things Kanye has already alluded to several times. on the album thus far. Shooting stars is a clever use of metaphor. While a shooting star is commonly used to describe someone's rapid or overnight success, we also realize that shooting stars in the light they emit is one of deterioration, a rock moving so fast through the Earth's atmosphere that it glows as it burns itself to death. Shooting stars live very brief, albeit rather sensational lives. Like the famous, there are a phenomenon we think looks beautiful at a distance, but if you're the rock that's burning, the experience isn't as glamorous as it might seem. The post hook continues and tells Vegas everywhere we are.

I believe Vegas is being used as representative of the glitz and glamour of fame, that life as a celebrity is like being a walking Vegas strip, a neon light of excitement that everyone can see from a mile away. But for most of us, the Vegas strip is a place we'd like to visit, but would hate to live, which makes the following line you can get it for the rest of your life, a bit ominous. money, sin, women, cars, lights, clubs, drugs, sex, alcohol, all these things are synonymous with both

Vegas life and celebrity culture, and it would seem Connie feels trapped by the indulgences and temptations that shadow him constantly. You can get it for the rest of your life feels like a menacing forewarning to his audience, to be careful what you wish for. After the conclusion of this post hook, verse one begins. I'm going to assume most of you've heard all the lights before, so our familiarity with the song might actually hinder how odd and striking Kanye's interest is here. So far, we've had a magniloquent sonic landscape accented by lyrics about vaguest lights and expensive cars.

We might expect, or at least went in question, Kanye using this platform for self-aggrandizing similar to Powers' introduction. And yet, Kanye's opening line is, Something Wrong, I Hold My Head, M.J. Gone, Our Endward Dead. Kanye chooses this bombastic beat to express his sorrow for the passing of Michael Jackson whose unexpected death in 2009 shocked the world. Connie's an enormous admirer of Michael Jackson

and credits him as someone who broke down boundaries so people like him could succeed. Of course you know, like Michael Jackson, like he had to fight to get his video played because he was black. This is Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson's not even black. He's Michael Jackson, you know what I mean?

It's like in a positive, you know, like saying he's so, crazy, like, how can he even be just classified as, like, you know, this black artist? So for me, you know, in my life and creativity, it's been challenging. Yeah, it's been challenging and everything, but I was able to ascend to massive levels of heights and never stop, right? Because of the foundation that my mother and my father and my grandfather laid through civil rights, what Michael Jackson did with music videos and the ground he broke, there would be no Kanye West if it wasn't for Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson was a prescription drug addict who took a cocktail of medications every day, including anti-anxiety and antidepressants. Insanely famous from a young age, Michael Jackson is perhaps history's largest representative of the tragic fate of many celebrities. It's no surprise then that Kanye dedicates his album about fame to Michael Jackson and the liner notes of my

beautiful dark twisted fantasy. Specifically on all the lights, Connie seems to be using Jackson's death and the epileptic onslaught of a beat to frame his conversation about his anxiety-ridden relationship with fame, which she explores metaphorically as a story about an abusive ex-con trying to win back his wife and daughter after being released from prison. I nigger dead. I slapped my girl. She called her fits. I did that time and spent that bread. I'm heading on, placing me. Connie introduces the circumstances around his fictionalized narrative with the opening line, I slap my girl, she called the feds, I did that time and spent that bread. Of course, Connie is speaking metaphorically here, as he's never been to prison for domestic abuse.

We can most obviously connect this story with Connie's incident at the VMAs, Taylor Swift being the slap girl, the public being the feds, and doing time being the self-imposed exile to Japan, Europe, and Hawaii following the incident. Connie then says, I'm heading home, I'm almost there, I'm on my way heading up the stairs. To my surprise, an N-word replacing me, I had to take him to that ghetto university. Again, we can find parallels in Kanye's actual life in which he fears the public has moved on. That his bo-paw at the VMA's and his most recent album at that time, 808's and heartbreak, alienated and put at risk his relationship with his fans.

A ghetto university, which was actually the original title for the song, is an education via street life, and is used here to allude to the fact that Kanye kicked the new boyfriend's ass. We may liken this statement to my beautiful dark twisted fantasy itself. Connie's aggressive attempt to win back the public by returning to rap and creating an indisputable verbal assault so good we have no choice but to respect him. After this brief but bewildering verse, the pre-course begins. Connie's assertive list of lights adds to the sensory overload that we've been experiencing thus far on the track. It provides a new dynamic to the lights theme established in the song's introduction. There we heard about the glamorous

lights of fast cars, shooting stars in Las Vegas. Kanye in the pre-chorus is here to show us another side of lights, ones with mostly negative connotations. Coming after the allusions to an altercation at the conclusion of the verse, cop lights, flashlights, and spotlights remind us of law enforcement, a persecution and reprimand, of being hunted and singled out. Connie then frames these lights in a context of lifestyle, fast life, drug life, thug life, rock life. Here, Kanye seems to be merging and showing parallels between celebrity life and street life. Both celebrities and convicts like Kanye portrays on the verse often live fast lives full of drugs and altercation. Rock life is a clever use of double meaning with the word rock.

It represents both rock or crack cocaine and Rockefeller Records, again displaying the intersection of street and celebrity life. The pre-chorus is followed by another repetition of the hook. Like on dark fantasy, gorgeous, and power, our initial impression of the hook and its meaning is altered after hearing the context of the verse and pre-chorus. Turn up the lights in here, extra bright, I want you all to see this, wanting to see all the lights, becomes even more clearly an expose of the ugly side of fame. It heightens the significance of verse 1, as if the metaphoric story Kanye tells is the very thing that she wants illuminated. On verse 2, Kanye continues to see. story started on verse 1, adding complexity in depth.

Kanye's fictitious story develops complexity with the addition of a child introduced in verse 2's opening line. Restraining order can't see my daughter. Kanye's relationship with his daughter is put at risk by his abusive treatment of her mother, as outlined in verse one. Of course, Kanye didn't have a daughter in real life at the time of writing all the lights, so we might ask ourselves what he means by this. The answer, or at least the key to my interpretation, is found in the previous track power. Let's have a listen. My childlike creativity, purity, and honesty is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts. Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child, I'm fighting for custody.

Like we noted on our power episode, Kanye likens his creativity to the purity of a child, something he speaks on often in interviews. The domestic abuse and jail time of verse 1 can be viewed as metaphor for the VMAs and his self-imposed exile, then we can liken the restraining order and child of verse 2 to the post-VMA restraints put on his creativity and music. Without his mother, a girlfriend, or children of his own, it wouldn't be a stretch to think at this point in Kanye's life, his music and creative muse were the most valuable things to him, the things he held most dear. He elaborates on the restraints placed on his art with the line, Public Visitation We Met at Borders. Borders was a book

and music retail chain that was operational at the time of Twisted Fantasy, but has since shut down. I believe Kanye is using the public visitation metaphor as a limitations he feels that are now being put on his art. Because he's lost the trust in the world, he's forced to be cautious and limit his self-expression, his childlike creativity, a situation he perhaps views akin to only seeing your child in a public space. It's degrading and unnatural. Cleverly, Kanye chose borders as representative of that space, which is of course a place one by his music, but also alludes to a physical border wall placed between him and his child or creative muse. As verse two concludes,

Connie begins showing signs of maturation and remorse. After verse 1, which opens with a line about slapping his girl and ends with the line about beating the new boyfriend. The lines told her she take me back, I'll be more supportive. I made mistakes. I bump my head. Represent a shift in attitude. For me, the latter two lines always stand out for their admission and repentance.

It seems like a genuine point. for forgiveness. The earnestness of the moment creates a strange juxtaposition against the extravagant musical backdrop, like someone trying to apologize in a noisy strip club. The sincerity suck from their words due to the environment in which they're spoken. Connie continues his attempts at atonement as the verse concludes, saying, she need her daddy, baby please, can't let her grow up in that ghetto university. There's a kind of desperation in Kanye's voice here. He cites again the ghetto university brought up in verse one, but instead of using it as insinuation to a jealousy-induced altercation, here in verse two, it's a metaphor for the broken, fatherless home his daughter will be forced to grow up in without

him. The contrast in the use of Ghetto University displays a narrative arc of the song. Connie's character begins a delinquent violent abuser in verse one, and ends a fearful, remorse-filled father in verse two. For going to continue the metaphor that Connie's daughter hears his childlike creativity, then it would seem he fears the degradation of his art due to a solid relationship with the public. The desperation in his voice is a worrisome expression of a world in which Kanye isn't able to create music, where hip-hop and culture moves in a different direction because it lacks his influence. After a repetition of the pre-chorus and hook, a bridge is performed by Kid Cuddy. Cutty sings, Getting Mine, Gotta Let these end words know. Getting right, you should go and get your own.

While it's somewhat cryptic, this bridge could be viewed as a conclusion to the abuser's story told on the verses. After pleading with his baby's mother for forgiveness, the two-part ways, a disillusion fueled by prioritizing self-fulfillment and gaining mind over conjugal harmony. It marks the beginning of the end as the musical material starts to strip away and a new character enters, played by singer Fergie of the Black-Eyed Peas. Fergie's entrance is an abrupt tour. shift as the music begins to tear away from the scenes. She says, unemployment line, credit card decline, did I not mention I was about to lose my mind, and also was about to do that

line? We're going all the way this time. If we're still attempting to piece together the narrative and characters on all the lights, then this performance could be either Connie's girl or his daughter now grown up. It would seem to me to be more plausible that it's the daughter character. Connie leaves us on verse two, fearing his daughter would grow up fatherless in the ghetto university, slaying for street life in a broken home. It would seem that his fears were realized if we're thinking about the kid cuddy bridge as dissolution of the parents' relationship. The daughter then enters as a kind of epilogue to the story,

and her being raised fatherless in a broken home, a quote-unquote ghetto university, finds her struggling both mentally and financially, turning to drugs for escape, and perhaps an allusion to suicide with the last line, we're going all the way this time. And while all those connections do make narrative sense, let's not forget that it can be and is perhaps best viewed as a grand metaphor for Kanye's life. Declining credit cards and unemployment become the state of his music career post-VMAs. The next line about losing one's mind is the anxiety he feels after the vilification that followed the VMAs,

leading him to flee the country. We've already heard multiple times on the album, the temptation to escape drugs and alcohol, and here on the bridge it's expressed as, quote, about to do that line. These personal feelings cryptically expressed through the daughter character are an example of the fantasy world we've crossed over to after the funereal interlude. After Fergie's brief cameo, all of the lights deteriorates, and were left with a mysterious ticking clock-like melody.

This breakdown is followed by an altered performance of the song's hook sung by Charlie Wilson, Elton John, John Legend, Ryan Leslie, The Dream, and Tony Williams. An outro is then performed by Elton John and Alicia Keys. Elton John sings, I tried to tell you but all I could say is, which is then cut off by a series of O sung by Alicia Keys. Again, things are a little cryptic here, but we might hypothesize that Kanye was trying to tell us about his life, about fame and celebrity,

but all he could come up with was an extravagant ambiguous anthem that conceals the extremities of his emotional distress and anxiety. We could also see the line being an abbreviation of a common phrase, I try to tell you I'm sorry. This interpretation would circle back to Connie's remorseful pleas to his baby's mother, who if you'll remember is a metaphor for the public. Again, if we're framing this narrative around his life amid the VMA backlash, it would seem that there's a part of Connie that seems to truly seek forgiveness, but also another equal part that feels his actions were justified, and so he's not quite able to apologize completely.

To further illuminate this point, we turned to Kanye's 2013 description of my beautiful dark twisted fantasy as his long backhanded apology, telling the New York Times, quote, You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics. I was like, let me show you guys what I can do,

and please accept me back. unquote. Conclusions. All the Lights is surely a display of Kanye's sonic acrobatics if there ever was one. His 14 high-profile guest vocalist, many of which are challenging to even hear, exemplify the song's approach to extravagance. A sonic skyscraper so ambitious that one misplaced brick could set off a dramatic implosion. All the lights is the kind of decadence that borders on excessive indulgence, like the terrible feeling you get after eating too much cake. It seemed this kind of problematic indulgence is an inherent quality of celebrity, and all of the lights as a calculated overstimulation, a sensory overload aimed to express the

strung outedness of a life lived beneath a perpetual spotlight. Indeed, the music video of all the lights begins with a required epilepsy disclaimer, the pulsating lights and rapid cuts combined with the song Sonic Assault being enough to trigger a seizure, a fitting metaphor for celebrity life. When we began today's show, I mentioned that I viewed the musical interlude following power as a portal to another world. While there's been brief moments of fantasy at the end of the song Dark Fantasy and elsewhere, on all of the lights we hear for the first time an elaborate fantasy world created throughout the entire song, complete

with its own narrative arc. Like the tyrant to schizoid transformation on power, all of the lights begins a glamorous, ambitious ode to stardom and ends a dysfunctional unraveling mess. It's an ongoing expression of the internal conflict and dichotomy Kanye feels within himself, forever torn between the the justification of his greatness and his apparent internal insecurity and sensitivity following the VMAs, his mother's death, and his failed engagement. Indeed, the closing few measures fumbled to a stuttering conclusion, far from the brassy, optimistic fanfare that began the track. After this anti-kilactic conclusion, we again are transported into another world, a world that

treats all the lights like a spent, lipstick-stained cigarette, stomping out its last waning hope-filled embers. This swamp-infested jungle of a world is a setting of the album's next track Monster, which will thoroughly explore next time on Dysect. Dysect is written and produced by me. Theme music by B-Rocratic. If you enjoy Dysect, consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast. Tell a friend about the podcast.

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