Interpretation of music in the modern day tends to suffer the pitfalls of romantic historicism. The matter of fact remains that understanding the content of the spoken word demands of us that we remove ourselves largely from He who says them. Nevertheless: Runaway.
I.
Runaway, the 9th track off of Kanye West's 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' (2010) opens with 37 seconds of sonic openness as the theme of Runaway is slowly introduced before being abruptly broken by the replacement of the somber piano with a synthesizer alongside the appearance of deep drums a heavy, buzzing synth-bass. Panning around where before was empty space are two samples of respectively Rick James and James Brown.
In a certain way, the opening of Runaway mirrors thought itself. Progressing with a slow and steady pacing between left and right (but nevertheless present first and foremost in the sonic middle), the sound of the piano is that of earnest and tragic repetition, the first twenty seconds of the song consisting of nothing but the repeating sound of an E7-note. And much as is the case for any such depressive repetition in thought, that self-contained thought cannot continue, and must too be depressed - pushed down, the repetitive rhythm of the E7 broken as the piano moves an octave down for a single note before the pattern itself is broken entirely, moving now to different notes, but nevertheless ever downwards. The E6 is followed by three D#7's, broken again by a single D#6 before returning to the surface again, though not as high as before, instead reaching three C#7's which, in a melody and pattern mirroring itself, are broken by a C#6. Only finally do we return to two A6's, a break in the pattern in some way, which are broken not by an A5 (which would've constituted a new low), but rather a G#6 - a fall nevertheless. Finally, we return to where we began, an E7, before the cycle repeats itself. A pattern has emerged here, being fixated exactly in its return.
The introductory piano remains a constant throughout the entire song, even if the sonic profile and instrumentation of the pattern itself is sustained. It marks a kind of permanency in its pattern, marking changes but nevertheless changes foreseeable and repeating. Never does it rise above that E7 note, and in a certain sense, it should seem that, having started there on that thin, wiry sound, we might be surprised to even return to it - marking now the metaphor of mood. The note nevertheless does return, and so does that pattern of doom and fall never to be escaped so long as thought itself is present. It marks the gradual descent into the deep, marked by highs which are beaten down my falls from which one doesn't truly recover until the cycle itself restarts; were the pattern itself to be taken as a metaphor for life itself, it might be worth noting that still, it ends on the same high that it started, death being equal here to birth. It seems a slim hope, though, and to get there we'll have to suffer numerous ills from which we never truly recover. To those skeptic of the metaphor used here, recall only that "tone" in truth does not differ very much from "mood" at all.
The mood and its development is, of course, strictly uni-polar. It is the mark of a descent with a return to normal. It is the story of a repeated fall. And I think, in a certain sense, one would not be wrong to point to a certain Kierkegaardian conception of Anxiety to be found within those first twenty seconds of eerie E7-notes; indeed, those very twenty seconds themselves seem to carry an element of principal anxiety, we as listeners only all too aware that it cannot go on forever, that eventually that immediate state must disappear. And so, with the literal fall to the octave below that anxious tension is released, the melody is set in motion and is made alive - the song made into actual song -, and never again will it return to the original, unnerving staticity of two first twenty seconds. What lacks in order for the Kierkegaardian conception of Anxiety to be truly manifest in the song is something in its content to move the song from the realm of pure symbolic comparability to something more substantially similar. This moment, I believe, cannot be found in the musical composition itself, as it seeks to develop its tension with both the eerie anxiety of prolonged high notes, the sadness of its sudden fall from the first E7 reinforced only by its movement to a D# before finally seeing hope in hope in the movement from C# to A and finally a hopeful G# (further reinforcing, too, the joyous innocence of the initial E) as the cycle repeats. The mood is there, and so is the anxiety, even if stripped of the unambiguous content we might desire for the comparison to unfold into genuine meaningful completeness.
II.
The answer lies in waiting in the very first voices present in the song - those aforementioned samples of Rick James and James Brown which will continue to haunt the song for the rest of its duration:
Look at ya, look at ya, look at ya, look at ya
Look at ya, look at ya, look at ya, look at ya
Look at ya, look at ya, look at ya, look at ya
Look at ya, look at ya, look at ya, look at ya
Ladies and gentlemen, ladies, ladies and gentlemen
Rick James' slightly distorted voice pans around the mix, surrounding us and bringing about that most accursed gift of humanity: self-consciousness.
Refraining from a turn to psychoanalysis, James' voice is an actual call from outside of our own conscious-being, calling forth from the music itself, an imperative demand self-consciousness. It is, of course not any sort of arbitrary self-consciousness that is being demanded, but a radically non-solipsistic one; in James' Voice, The Other asks us to consider ourselves as an Other. Such a demand thus also more than just a "looking at yourself" or "thinking about yourself" or "considering yourself from the perspective of others". The demand, formulated simply here as a repeated mantra demanding self-consciousness, carries with it a foregone conclusion, and more crucially, a most critical one at that.
James, speaking as the voice from the social reality which rules all parts of the world but our own skull-kingdom, must have a reason to do so - to speak. This is the conclusion present in the imperative, the critical foundation on which the legitimacy of James' imperative lies. For in looking at ourselves and being demanded to do so, and being demanded to do so but without further instruction, the imperative takes on the colour of something not all to different from that most famous phrase of Rilke: Du mußt dein Leben ändern, You have to change your life.
It is exactly because there is something wrong with us that we are being demanded to look at ourselves, and inasmuch as we are told to look at ourselves, looking must only be the first step. What James truly says is that we must change, but, much as Rilke, he provides no guidance as to what must be gone. In this sense, the demand of critical self-consciousness and self-examination is totalitarian and non-judgmental at the same time, the totalitarian aspect only manifested further in the panning of his voice which seems to call to us from all sides. The particularities of our predicament are left for ourselves to determine, only - and so this is another connotation of the particular notion of looking - it should seem that they ought even be obvious. That, at the very point at which James speaks to us, our flaws have come to be so real and apparent that even a glance out to be enough. How might it have been possible that this state of affairs came to be about without our noticing it? Well, one might say, perhaps the issue, seeing as to the seeming ease of a future diagnosis merely in looking, is that we never bothered to look before. Or, perhaps, that we never looked in the right places, namely in reality. This, to me, seems to be the necessary condition for the truth of what James is saying, that there is obviously something wrong to be seen that we have missed. Only by a lack of genuine self-reflection which faces ourself in the social and visible reality of things, that is - our actions as they are present in the world, rather than our self-delusions, self-delusions which have gotten us to this point of necessary change.
In a rather unusual fashion, the passivity present in onlooking also mirrors the very structure of music-listening itself, we as listeners passively absorbing the music created without ourselves creating anything - perhaps not even making sense of what is being heard. The imperative present, then, calls upon us too to now "wake up", listen to the story being told - a story introduced by Brown who opens the show.
Which of course tells us something else, too, then. Namely that what is about to happen is not a call simply for our self-consciousness - a call which we have already been given, but also that it is not only we who must confront or look at ourselves. Indeed, others will too. In a brief moment, the story (for that is what it is) will begin, staged now for us to hear. The appearance to consciousness of the show-nature of music (for music, at least music with lyrics, is inherently narrative) is a turn away from the self-consciousness previously demanded, transforming thus simultaneously the imperative of James', which appears now as not simply a demand on us, but perhaps rather as (self-)conscience itself now manifest musically. Consciousness and conscience are, of course, closely related - the extent of their divisibility appears to be unclear, and indeed, the demand for self-confrontation has not been changed to the slightest. It is in this light that the beginning of Kanye's own lyrics (which are soon to come) must be understood; not as the single response which James' imperative demanded, but one answer among others, a point made manifestly clear by the later appearance of Pusha-T's verse.