Kanye West, Prince Drop "Amazin'" and "Crimson & Clover" Videos

So far for the videos off 808s & Heartbreak, Kanye West has found inspiration in American Psycho ("Love Lockdown"), rotoscoping ("Heartless"), pixel manipulation ("Welcome to Heartbreak") and now, for the single "Amazin'," West has turned to nature. The video, which premiered yesterday on BET, was directed by Hype Williams but is indebted to the work of photographer Sebastiao Salgado, as "Amazin'" takes us on a tour of breathtaking scenery in exotic areas of Hawaii. It's like watching the National Geographic Channel with 808s & Heartbreak playing, but West sometimes appears overlooking a vast canyon or singing in a green forest, reminding us we're watching music video. Young Jeezy also shows up at a bonfire for his cameo. It is all "amazing" to look at, if that's what West was going for.

Also on the Net today, Prince's video for his cover of Tommy James & the Shondells' "Crimson & Clover," which featured on the CD version of the singer's LOtUSFLOW3R. The video takes the bright neon artwork of his three new album covers and puts it in motion, creating a clip that looks like those psychedelic opening-credit sequences from James Bond films when naked women are fired out of revolvers and such. The real shock here, however, is that a Prince video is actually on YouTube, considering that the Purple One worked so hard to ban himself from the video Website. Maybe Web Sheriff is sleeping on the job? Watch the video below before it's inevitably torn down.

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

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.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter