Ye, the rapper once known as Kanye West, released his 12th record and first solo effort in four years over the weekend. With pushed release dates and esoteric listening events, the rollout has had the hallmarks of an album drop from the lauded but mercurial artist whose wild and problematic recent past have seen him fulfill his dreams and then throw them all away, as he subjected the public to an endless series of offenses and tested the limits of those close to him.
Ye has also remarried since his last solo release, and his wife, Australian architect and performance artist Bianca Censori, has made a distinctive splash while sporadically commanding collective attention. Holding her own was always going to be a tough task, given the highly scrutinized woman her husband divorced just before their secret nuptials in late 2022.
Soon, a Venetian water taxi sex scandal and her nearly nude red carpet appearance gave way to questions about Censori and Ye’s relationship. Then the unveiling of a Vanity Fair profile — her first public statements since she began to shed mere fame by proxy and come into focus. The main takeaway of that feature and lush spread was that she is not subservient to Ye, but that her life is in service of him — through antisemitic rants, wild bipolar mood swings, and whatever comes next.
Devotion like this is destined to bleed into Censori’s art, which brings us to her directorial debut. She’s the woman behind Bully’s striking first music video, for the album track “Father.” The song features Ye loyalist Travis Scott, another hip-hop icon who knows his way around dark controversy. The video has the feel of a Jacques Tati film’s cinematography and the weight of an Andrei Tarkovsky epic, constrained to an under-three-minute track length.
The set, as the psyche of Censori’s vision, is a church interior. Each parishioner seems symbolic (a girl in a blue veil seated in the background; a woman with a magician; the late King of Pop pulling focus in the back row), and the actions seen here are the rituals that define and control us. Scott and Ye are interchangeable men: the latter with his classic thousand-mile stare, the former confidently wedding two women at once. They are also alien beings, their spaceship landing and blasting off in the background. Meanwhile, a sleeping nun is hauled off by two cops; a child trips a chef delivering a massive cake. In Censori’s debut, the rituals of religious life and the looming terror of dystopian control take center stage, drifting in and out. The whole clip is captured in a single, continuous take.
Censori declined to answer The Hollywood Reporter’s questions about her vision for the video, but offered this quote in a prepared release: “The film presents a church not as a real place, but as a surreal, dreamlike environment, where time feels slowed, spatial logic is distorted, and reality becomes fantasy,” she said.
It plays as high art — almost like an installation. Censori sets Ye’s music to a highbrow video art piece where memory meshes with fantasy, and any frozen frame could make a striking still. With “Father,” she has taken the artistry found in Ye’s prior music videos to the next level. It may be seen as a challenge or a riddle to be solved, especially as it arrives from such a highly discussed couple, both deeply embedded in the worlds of high art and fashion. There’s plenty here to chew on.
Is Censori, as portrayed so far — particularly in the one instance she spoke up, insistent yet somewhat unconvincing that she’s not subservient to Ye’s overpowering everythingness — truly independent? Then why has she opted here to meld the same fashion-performance art–religious iconography he has already dabbled in? “Bye-bye to my old self / Wake up to the new me,” Ye belts out on the track; his role in the video is largely ceded to his collaborator on “Father,” while a choir and, yes, a priest, clock the most screen time.
But Censori is never going to be so obvious. She kept quiet for a remarkable stretch in the early years of her relationship with Ye, during which she was painted as another rag doll for him to toss around. She’s more than that, as she told Vanity Fair, and her debut as a filmmaker feels like an apt confirmation.
