Kanye West Debuts "Love Lockdown" Video on "Ellen"

Kanye West premiered his new video for "Love Lockdown" today on Ellen. Like the three "Flashing Lights" videos before it, "Lockdown" makes for a strange viewing, with a despondent West loafing around depressed in a white room surrounded by a bunch of African tribes and 15-foot women covered in Day-Glo paint. That's essentially the plot. At the halfway mark, a spaceship inexplicably makes an appearance, but the highlight of the whole thing is at the 1:09 when the guy with the spear breaks through the aspect ratio for a too-brief 3D feel. Still, the weirdest part this whole thing is that West premiered this clip on Ellen DeGeneres' show — maybe we can look forward to premiere of the "Heartless" video on The View. Kanye isn't the only one not using MTV to premiere new videos this week, however, as Britney Spears will debut her "Womanizer" on 20/20 Friday while Weezer unveiled their "Troublemaker" video on Yahoo!

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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