Kanye West, Spike Jonze's "Fairytale" Short Out in September

A long-form video starring Kanye West featuring his 808s & Heartbreak's "See You In My Nightmares" will hit iTunes on September 8th, according to the blog of director Spike Jonze, who helmed the short film now titled We Were Once a Fairytale. (The title is taken from the song's lyrics.) As Rock Daily reported, West and Jonze previously teamed up for Kanye's stunningly strange Graduation vid "Flashing Lights." The approximately 15-minute "See You in My Nightmares" film initially debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June.

"It's not necessarily [a video for 'Nightmares'], but the song is featured in it. We're still editing it right now, it's probably going to run between 10-15 minutes," Jonze's producing partner Vincent Landay told MTV about the "See You" video in March. "Essentially, we've been editing it whenever we had time — it'll be a couple of weeks on and then a couple of weeks off. Nobody's making any money on it, so it's sort of like, 'Hey, let's get in there and edit on night and weekends.' "

According to the Daily Swarm, who saw the video at the LAFF, We Were Once a Fairytale stars Kanye as Kanye, with the rapper getting drunk at a club and telling the ladies that the song playing on the speakers is his. He brings one of the women home and engages in sexual relations only to realize he's getting it on with a pillow. Then, like in American Beauty, West starts vomiting rose petals. And that's just the first act! From there, Kanye finds a knife, digs a rodent out his hand, then the rodent kills itself with a smaller knife. We'd be nervous about the whole endeavor if not for the involvement of Jonze, a master music video director who is also helming this autumn's Where the Wild Things Are.

Like some of the 808s videos, notably "Paranoid," the music itself is slightly updated and bettered compared to their album versions, with Jonze's brother and N.A.S.A. man Squeak E. Clean remixing the new "See You," Daily Swarm reports. Even though "See You In My Nightmares" features a verse from Lil Wayne, no reports place Weezy in We Were Once a Fairytale.

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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