Can Kanye West really get away with 'Famous' video?
CBC Radio | Posted: June 29, 2016 12:26 PM | Last Updated: June 29, 2016
q's pop culture panel weighs in on the worthy, contentious, and mind-boggling stories from the week in arts and entertainment. Opinionated and irreverent, our panel takes pop culture seriously (but not too seriously).
Today's panellists are Chatelaine's editor-at-large Rachel Giese, film and TV director Charles Officer, and host of CBC's Exhibitionists Amanda Parris. Up for discussion:
- Kanye West's controversial new video for Famous, which features nude replicas of celebrities in a remake of Vincent Desiderio's Sleep. (Read a detailed description here.) "There's nothing new about the commentary, and I think it's a bit self indulgent," says Officer. "Even the lyrics of the track [don't] add up for me." Giese describes the video as provocative, disturbing and straight up "maddening". Parris says she felt a mix of amazement, horror and — boredom.
- Grey's Anatomy actor Jesse Williams' powerful BET awards speech. "There was so much poetry in it," says Parris, describing the speech as a revelation and a powerful reminder of the larger historical context. "He called out the people in the room." Giese agrees, calling it a "perfect galvanizing moment."
Excerpt from the speech: Let's get a couple things straight. Just a little side note. The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That's not our job. All right? Stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest—if you have no interest in equal rights for black people, then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.
We've been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we're done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil—black gold—ghettoizing and demeaning our creations, then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is, though—the thing is that just because we're magic doesn't mean we're not real. - There's a debate over depiction of a large Polynesian god in the new Disney film, Moana. Officer says he understands the sensitivity, especially within underrepresented communities, but the depiction of rounder shaped individuals does not strike him as particularly offensive. "Why can't we embrace them?"