New Videos for The-Dream's "Walkin' on the Moon," Kanye's "Paranoid" Debut

A pair of Kanye West-related videos that leaked after last week's Island Def Jam spring party made their official debuts yesterday, as legit versions of The-Dream's "Walkin' on the Moon" featuring West, and West's own "Paranoid," starring Rihanna, hit the blogs.

For "Walkin' on the Moon," off The-Dream's excellent second album Love Vs. Money, the Atlanta crooner enlisted the help of hip-hop video director extraordinaire Hype Williams to tell the story of a man walking on the moon. That's pretty much the premise of the video: The-Dream travels around space in a ship that looks like the Millennium Falcon as beautiful women prance around sets that were probably lying around since Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream" video. The video also features some of the worst green screen effects since the early 1990s whenever The-Dream — strutting around in a bedazzled leather jacket like he was Sir Gaga — actually sings from the lunar surface. For his cameo, Kanye raps in front of a giant screen showing space traveling at warp speed. It's not The Right Stuff, but the song rocks.

Rock Daily wrote at length about Kanye's video for the 808s & Heartbreak standout "Paranoid" last week, but it seems some last minute editing has gone down since the leak. For starters, the anti-reading Kanye has eliminated all the words from the beginning of the video, instead adding more trance-like shots of himself. Other than that and some sequencing tweaks, the plot remains the same: Rihanna wakes up out of a nightmare, dances around in ultra-provocative lingerie and drives away maniacally in film noir fashion from something in her past. The video is rife with symbolism given the recent events in the young star's life.

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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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