After the independent media had a field day with the fact that Jay-Z and Kanye West turned a $370,000 car into a jeep I must yawn. The Otis video is not controversial, or even all that interesting, through any stretch of the imagination. They tear up a car, put a bunch of their light skinned girl friends in the back and drive around a lot. There is a huge American flag in the background, and plenty of symbolism to be found.
The first and most obvious subliminal here is that being able to act indifferently with a car worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is the American dream. Jay-Z and Kanye West are multi-millionaires, and they are letting you know it upfront. They can afford to blow $370,000 like it is nothing. They are not interested in the resale value of this vehicle because they do not care about the vehicle itself.
They are interested in the ingredients of what that car has to offer, in order to retrofit it in and use it for their own amusement. See me and you, we want money so that we can show people how we fit into the American dream through some ideal of what a designer or engineer tells us is good taste. Jay-Z and Kanye West, they just want the infrastructure so that they can reverse engineer good ingredients and find their own way of telling you what is important to them. That is what is lost on idiots that wax poetic about the fact that they are destroying a vehicle; what they are telling you is that they do not care how you perceive them in their product. The message that they want to convey, is more important than the products themselves. The products are a tool used to illustrate a larger point, not the destination. Plus they can buy another $370,000 vehicle off of someone else and flip it differently if you do not want to sell to them, it really does not matter.
The second message deals with the idea of having light skinned girls in the back of the ride enjoying the ride and having the time of their life. The girls aren’t driving the vehicle, they aren’t on the passenger side either. They are in the back, behind these guys, as they should be. Remember that Jay-Z is married and Kanye West is into White girls. These are just some girls they just happen to know, groupies even, but they are some girls you might leave your girl in order to be with. Second or third place in their mind, worth giving up the kitchen sink for in yours.
The third message is of the American dream. It is not accident that you see a huge American flag in the video. This is part of the all-American, Ralph Lauren/Bruce Weber/lifestyle type of marketing that Jay-Z has been doing since his last album. Suggesting that his work is for everyone, instead of for the neighborhood. Jay-Z is that rare individual that came from the neighborhood but can hang out with Oprah and Bill Gates. Kanye West is that rare individual that came from money, but is just as comfortable (if not more) hanging out with proper, reformed thugs like Jay-Z than he is his bourgeois peers. He could have went to school and made something of himself, but he chased the money and his dreams as a producer. There is a reason that his initial marketing scheme waxed poetic about dropping out of college. He is chasing the same dream that those who dropped out of college and struck it rich have.
The messages themselves are not all that. There is nothing evil or disingenuous about this video. There is no “Illuminati”, Dark Horse, satanic influences here. Your toddler can watch this video. But it is the continuation of even deeper programming and marketing by Jay-Z of his brand. Take it or leave it, but the mainstream media is focusing on the wrong things here and missing what it is important. Then again, that is exactly how this video was marketed to the masses …