Thirteen People on One Song

The epilepsy warning that strobed before the All of the Lights video felt like exactly the right introduction to a Kanye West song from this period—here is something that might hurt you, but you’re going to watch anyway. The clip strobed hard enough that I could feel it behind my eyes, which was probably the point: disorientation as aesthetic, sensory overload deployed as emotional honesty. Hype Williams directed it. Neon everywhere. A domestic violence narrative that kept interrupting the spectacle with something uglier and more true.

The song credited thirteen featured artists. Rihanna on the hook, Kid Cudi buried somewhere in the arrangement, Elton John at a piano, Fergie, John Legend, Elly Jackson from La Roux—a cast so excessive it circled back around into making a kind of deranged sense. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy had been out a few months at that point and I was still somewhere in the middle of it, finding new surfaces with each listen. All of the Lights sat at the album’s extravagant center: the moment where Kanye stopped pretending the project wasn’t the most expensive self-portrait ever committed to tape. The orchestral swell Mike Dean built underneath it felt genuinely oppressive—all that money and ambition and grief pressed into something that somehow held together.