Gifted and Wasted

Three of the most interesting people in music in 2009—Kanye West, Santigold, Lykke Li—ended up on the same track together, and Gifted is exactly as good as that lineup suggests. The song has a strange gravitational pull, three completely different creative energies held in tension, and it deserved something serious. Instead it got a cartoon video. Not a formally interesting or meaningful cartoon—just generic animation that says nothing about the song and nothing about any of the people involved. A missed opportunity on a scale that actually hurts a little.

I’d have loved a proper visual with all three of them in the same space, some real document of this collaboration. That didn’t happen. What we got was filler dressed up as a visual. The track survives it, but only barely.