The most obvious point of inspiration for Kanye West‘s “Fade” music video is as plain as the cat nose on Teyana Taylor’s face. But according to 24-year-old director Eli Russell Linnetz, there’s a lot more going on with Kanye’s latest clip than Flashdance. Linnetz told the New York Times that he pulled inspiration for the video that premiered at the 2016 VMAs from ’70s porn and Ohio Players albums, among many other things.
“The Ohio Players’ album covers were our starting point. Some people picked up on the Grace Jones boxing images by Jean-Paul Goude. I pulled a lot of references from ’70s and ’80s porn, just on Pornhub,” he said. “That was less about the imagery and more about the texture of the skin, the oiliness. There’s John Carpenter films, The Fly. There’s also things like Dancing With the Stars, the Olympics and the NBA championship.”
Like all things even tangentially related to Kanye, some of this is easy to understand and some of it sounds crazy. The Fly seems like an odd reference until you consider the Animorph-ending. And Grace Jones is easy to see once you think of it. But where does Dancing With The Stars come in?
Linnetz also went into other details of the shoot, corroborating Teyana Taylor’s story about the sheep-poop-covered set. And while he didn’t give a full-on explanation of the video’s odd ending, he did say that upcoming developments would help bring it into focus.
“The last image is foreshadowing bigger things to come, which you guys will find out about soon enough,” he said.
We can only take that to mean a non-Balmain “Wolves” is coming. Watch the “Fade” video below if you haven’t caught it yet.
