While no one was really watching, Kanye West won an award at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend. It might seem like a weird occasion—why would an artist known largely for his music be receiving an award at a film festival?—but even weirder than the bestowing of the award was the way in which Kanye accepted it.
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Here’s the full story: Kanye and legendary music producer Rick Rubin (who was Kanye’s main collaborator on his last album, “Yeezus”) received one of the Tribeca Film Festival’s Disruptive Innovation Awards on behalf of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, colloquially known as simply an 808. Since it’s kinda difficult to give an award to a machine, the Festival organizers chose West and Rubin to collectively accept on behalf of the 808.
Neither of them could attend the ceremony, so they sent in a video acceptance. This is standard procedure when recipients accept awards en absentia, but (naturally) West and Rubin took a particularly avant garde approach to it. The video is reminiscent of some of the more stream-of-consciousness film projects Spanish artist Salvador Dalí created during his hey day (think: “Un Chien Andalou“); there’s a lot of weird imagery and sounds that don’t synchronize with people’s mouths, and so on.
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We can’t really do it justice by talking about it; check out the strange (and somehow equally awesome) clip below! We pretty much couldn’t take our eyes away from it.
