Takashi Murakami, the renowned Japanese Pop Artist forever famous for his ultra-sheik take on fashion and commercialism, launches his career even further with his continuing efforts advancing superflat art like a bear out of a cannon. One of the oddest pairs in recent pop history, I present to you the very strange Kanye West and Takashi Murakami!
That's right! The iconic cover to the 2007 double-platinum album sung by rapper Kanye Omari West was designed by Takashi Murakami (also responsible for bringing the current Louis Vuitton branding fashion to the mainstream). The reason this matters is because the video itself is a fleshed out version of the cover art. It follows the depicted bear (Kanye) on his graduation day in "Universe City."
The visuals are insane. A single image of this looks weird enough, but to bring the art to a constant level is just bizarre. A real flight of fantasy, Good Morning starts on a small scale and the quickly builds up a pace that ends in a nonsensical bang. The contrasting nature of realism in the songs lyrics against the very unreal presentation of the video make for a very fun and smart watch. Notice the small ironies here and there - the bear graduates from "Dropout University" among other things. It's short, wild, nonsensical and yeah it's not J-Pop. So what? It's a three minute romp through the mind of two very different artists.
Even if you don't like rap music I encourage this anime. Kanye's Graduation album is very much unlike the rap music of Tupac and 50 Cent that you may be familiar with - it uses a lot of electronic synthesizers and focuses a lot more on introspective topics than "gettin' down wit da bitches in da club" and "rottin me yellow (yuno what it is)." Good Morning might come as a surprise to you like it did for me, and who can resist modernist Japanese art anyways? There's no way you can lose out on this one.