Pig

Heads up: There are spoilers in this section.

I recently saw the movie Pig. On its surface, it’s loaded with the Nic Cage fanboy treatment. Cage plays a man who refuses to speak, lives in the woods with his (very) valuable truffle-finding pig, pig gets stolen, his idiosyncratic, mythical figure must exact revenge and get his pig back.

Except he doesn’t exact revenge. He takes beating after beating. When he is (constantly) presented with the opportunity to leverage violence as his means, he improbably relents and pursues peace. It’s not “Taken but with a pig.”

The movie was a critical darling, but by all accounts, it didn’t make money. The best estimates have it slightly above breaking even, others have it as a million-dollar loss. I found the movie lost momentum towards the end, undermined its climax, and that fantastical elements of the plot distanced it from the reality it was trying to create. I wasn’t enthralled by the result, but I very much enjoyed a number of its individual mechanisms, including its cinematography and the risks it took in its storytelling.

There should be more movies like this one, though, ones that don’t just take a left turn when we’re expecting a right — ones that are written from an entirely different place on the map. That’s why I believe it’s important that the movie got made. My feelings on its final assembly aside, it’s important that Pig was recognized so broadly and publicly in the hopes that more movies like this will get greenlit. It’s wild that an esoteric movie leveraged the real-world fandom of Cage’s acting choices to pursue an unexpected narrative. It’s emblematic of a creative approach that plays on the real-world expectations of fans, further blurring the fourth wall between our art and our lives. And when new creative approaches are pursued, we get further innovation and collaboration and remixing and rebuilding.

These results are rarely perfect out of the gate, either, but that’s rarely the point.

Stem Player

In today’s economy, video games are bigger in terms of the size of the business than movies and music and TV all put together. And what are they? They’re about going into the world and changing it and interacting with it. … My fundamental opinion is, the more we can see together, the more together we’ll be.

Alex Klein
Co-Founder of Kano Computing in GQ Magazine

Alex Klein is the co-founder of Kano Computers; Kano created the Stem Player device with Kanye West. GQ Magazine interviewed him about his work on the new product where he discusses, among other things, the inspiration for its design: Kano’s see-through computers, the machinery used in music studios, children interacting with it at Ye’s Yeezy Christian Academy, a destroyed Apple laptop, stress balls, (literal) rocks, arcade machines, products designed for people with autism. The two of them found inspiration for it everywhere. It was a communal process.

At its core, the Stem Player splits songs into their individual components so you can isolate the parts that made the whole, like unbaking a cake so you can reuse its ingredients for something else. This is why Ye was interested in working with Kano to begin with: The company sold computers in separate, easy-to-assemble parts so people could learn about the computer as they put it together. Like a meal kit delivery service, they send you the ingredients, you cook the meal. You teach them to fish. The computers they sold were a means to an end, relatively moot as an ideal; the understanding was the important part.

Klein grasped these fundamental aspects of learning and creating. If you can truly understand how something is put together, you can take ownership of the knowledge and break it into its pieces and build something innovative with its parts. That’s what I believe Ye is interested in.

Imitate And Improve

When he adopts an image or a suggestion from a predecessor and works it up into his own glittering fabric, I shall … (sum it up with) a modest canon: That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.

W. H. Davenport Adams
On presenting examples where poet “(Alfred) Tennyson constructed his verses using the efforts of his artistic antecedents as a resource”

Sampling music and using it as a collaborative tool to create new music is the cornerstone of hip-hop. Ye’s career was catapulted by his keen ability to do this, to use already existing music and reinterpret it, to imitate the sounds he grew up listening to and make something new. He created astonishing art this way, art that has resonated with people at the broadest of levels (pop music) and in the harshest of arenas (critical acclaim).

Throughout his career, he’s constantly morphed, playing with the inputs to push the level of his output. His albums are more akin to artistic periods that mirror David Bowie’s or Pablo Picasso’s expressive approach. When his mom tragically passed away in 2007, he wrote 808s and Heartbreak, his version of Kid A, embracing an electrocentric sound that contrasted wholly with the organic instrumentation that made his beats some of the most sought-after in the world. When he had a high-profile breakup and his disassociation and resentment towards the music industry peaked with his outburst at the 2009 MTV VMAs, he went into self-imposed exile in Hawai’i and began to experiment with letting other people in on his creative process:

I’d never worked the way Kanye was working in Hawaii. Everybody’s opinions mattered and counted. You would walk in, and there’s Consequence and Pusha T and everybody is sitting in there and he’s playing music and everyone is weighing in. It was like music by committee.

Q-Tip
Complex Magazine, Nov. 22, 2010

Noah Callahan-Bever, then the editor-in-chief of Complex, was at some of those recording sessions and echoed the sentiment: “Kanye’s process is communal — he literally goes around the room asking everyone there what ‘power’ means to them, throws out lines to see how they’re received, and works out his exact wording with whomever is around to help.”

Ye has taken sampling and collaboration and given life to it, editing his own music with live audiences, using it as real-time creative inspiration to remix and rebuild. He’s been doing a version of this since 2016, challenging what it meant to publish music, putting out The Life of Pablo, and then subsequently announcing he would “release new updates, new versions, and new iterations of the album. An innovative, continuous process, the album will be a living, evolving art project.”

In the GQ interview, Kano’s Klein brought up Ye’s most recent approach to making music, sampling, and manipulating inputs, and it sounds a whole lot like this process, magnified:

And that was what first made me realize that this world around us — even the magic of digital technology — is something that can be deconstructed and something that can be understood. I think Ye has that customizable, community-driven approach inherently, the way he did the astonishing (Donda) listening parties, where the album was taking shape in front of people’s eyes. It’s almost like an open source concept.

Klein

Kanye West went from “making five beats a day for three summers” alone in his bedroom to writing his music with hundreds of thousands of people on stage and at listening parties. He wants it to be alive, and his displeasure with releasing music set in stone appears to be so important to him that he created a device that encourages you to break it. He hasn’t been hiding it: He wants you to be a part of his living, evolving art project. He wants to clothe you in it.

Whether or not the device fails is not important. Whether or not Pig is a critical darling is not important. It’s important that humans try new things. And while viewing the Stem Player as an end game for selling DONDA 2 is a valid critique, I’d argue it’s viewing it through the wrong lens. It’s not about DONDA 2 getting into your hands; if that were the goal, he would have put it on every major platform. The Stem Player exists to displace a model and replace it with one that embraces failing fast, embracing flaws, and progress over perfection, something Ye has already embraced for years with his music.

At the very least, someone is trying something new. The process is the beautiful part, and the results are rarely perfect out of the gate. “There will continue to be work,” Klein said, “but we’re out there iterating and learning.” We should want the same thing. We should want something new.

That, and more pigs as protagonists.