Kanye West Unveils Epic New 'Runaway' Film

Kanye West unveiled his new 40-minute film Runaway — which is based around My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy 's second single — in Paris on Tuesday and in London last night. "Purple Rain, The Wall, Michael Jackson's Thriller — I wanted to do a modern version of that," Kanye said in his introduction, as the BBC reports. He added that he hopes the film will "bring real culture to popular culture," promising a worldwide debut in the next two weeks. The film will also be packaged with Fantasy when the album hits shelves on November 22nd.

Kanye West's Surprise Visit to Rolling Stone

Eight or nine other tracks from Dark Twisted Fantasy are also featured in the film, which West wrote and co-directed with art director Vanessa Beecroft and producer Jonathan Lia. West has described Runaway as "the story of a phoenix fallen to Earth, and I make her my girlfriend, and people discriminate against her and eventually she has to burn herself alive and go back to her world." Model Selita Ebanks plays the phoenix, and West's "Monster' cohort Nicki Minaj reportedly narrates the film in an English accent. The Hip-Hop Chronicle has a spoiler-filled rundown of the "epic" short film.

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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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