Kanye West With Pusha T, "Runaway"

I’m assuming you’ve seen the performance from Sunday night’s VMA award show already, so here’s the recorded version of Kanye West’s new song, “Runaway.” What’s to say? It’s great. Most of the music we’ve heard in the past few months, as Kanye has emerged from his quiet year of repentance after making an ass of himself at last year’s VMAs, has been great. It stands with rest of his catalogue, and his catalogue stands with that of any other artist currently working on his level. And well above most of them. But more than that, he understands that to be on that level-the big giant world-stage let-me-hear-you-scream level-he needs to be thinking about way more than just music. Clearly, he does. (How much time he must spend choosing his outfits!) He goes for the big show, the big statement, pretty much always. And pretty much always pulls off something special. XXL has a nice round-up of the big TV performances of Kanye’s career.

He knows that in today’s media climate, if you’re going to embrace being famous, privacy and quiet self-reflection are privileges almost impossibly hard to maintain. So he doesn’t try. This is a different tack than that taken by a Jay-Z, who says, “I’m so cool, you’ll never know the real me.” Or a Lady Gaga, who suggests “everything is artifice, there is no real me.” Instead he says “there is very much a real me, and I’m not cool enough to keep it hidden, so here it is, all the time.” (How exhausting this must be!) He throws everything out there, exposing himself over various platforms in some kind of exhibitionist reality star performance art thing. Emoting, emoting, emoting, joking sometimes, taking himself extremely seriously others, completely unafraid to try new things, opening himself to his audience in ways sometimes off-putting, sometimes endearing, but very rarely boring, he stays beating commenters and pundits to the punch, and backing it up with music that, whether or not it’s to one’s liking, is hard to experience as anything other than bold and adventurous and, yes, artistic. So here’s to Kanye, showing everyone how to be a pop star in the 21st Century.