[Disclaimer: This article should be read objectively. I appreciate many different genres of music, and many different artists. The ‘opinions’ on the artistry of certain artists songs is simply that-an opinion, however the context of this article is to discuss far more meaningful concepts in-depth. I have done my own research, and I urge you to do your own as well.]

There is a famous line in Malcolm X when after Malcolm disperses a crowd of organized NOI (Nation of Islam) members and angry Black people from a quick protest in front of a Harlem police station. A White police officer looks at Malcolm after he signals to the crowd to leave peacefully and he says, “That’s too much power for one man to have.” Every time I think of Kanye West’s Power, I think back to that movie and to that particular line.
This song and the video are very deep. A few weeks ago, I wrote a commentary about the debate going on in music, particularly Hip Hop/Rap – the conversation surrounding the fact that some artists are devil worshipers or are a part of the Illuminati or are Freemasons or what have you. I wanted to offer my opinion regarding Kanye’s video and a few other things. I wrote a piece a year ago regarding my “revelation” of these things and I may have been a bit drastic with my intentions. After I wrote it, I said that I would never listen to rap music again. Well, the truth is that I have listened to considerably less rap music than I have ever listened to ever. But even with all of the Mason talk, I still listen to Kanye and I still listen to Jay-Z. I actually have a bigger problem with cats like Lil Wayne and Drake. How come, because they give approval to promiscuity and irresponsibility – just my opinion but I digress. My generation coming up through middle school, high school and college really came up on Jay-Z and on Kanye to some degree. And when I hear all the garbage on the radio from cats whose names I cannot even pronounce, it is no wonder that Jay is considered one of the most highly regarded rappers in the mainstream.
The Blueprint was indeed a classic rap album. Jay was on his game and Kanye did most of the production. The Blueprint 2 was a disaster…Jay is known for a few disastrous albums in the mix with his genius ones. The Blueprint 3 was another classic rap album– Kanye and Jay reunited, and it felt so good because the album was a “banger”. But even I had to question the On to the Next One video. Over the past few months, I’ve come to learn a bit more about symbolism – Masonic, Egyptian and a few other things. That video had a lot of symbolism in it. Now as I said in a previous commentary, everyone has an agenda. Gospel artists have an agenda in their music and in their videos. We know (or at least I hope) that Jesus Christ is the agenda and bringing people to him is the purpose. I asserted that if this fact is true, then the opposite agenda – Satan worship and glorification – could also be true. And then there are videos and music that can offer an alternative to religious things; possibly an agenda that promotes group identity or “fraternity” if you will. There could be some that promote subliminal messaging to spread a message to promote whatever it is they are about. Regardless the agenda, you cannot deny the imagery and symbolism in music. There is symbolism and imagery in all of the arts; we learn this in school. We’ve all read poetry by Keats, Longfellow, Frost, Wadsworth, Thoreau and Poe…your English/literature teacher taught you of the imagery and symbolism in those poems. You have seen the art work of da Vinci and Michelangelo; you know of the imagery and symbolism in their works. So why when someone comments on the imagery and symbolism in music, especially rap music, people get annoyed or dismissive? There really is no need to, the fact of the matter is music is made to express and relay messages either directly or indirectly. Imagery and symbolism is used to relay whatever message is meant to be spread. In that regard, Jay and Kanye are no different from Henry David Thoreau or Edgar Allen Poe.
I will not attempt to decipher the entire Power video, but what I will do is pick out four things that I see and comment. Let me start by saying that from an artistic stand point, the video looks beautiful. It is absolutely amazing the way this thing looks. But, like the old folks say, looks are deceiving. As soon as the video starts, it gets crazy. Kayne has these glowing eyes – what does that represent – with pillars/columns on each side of him. But the first thing that I want to point out is what is around his neck. Now Kanye always talks about his “Jesus Piece,” but apparently in this video, he’s exchanged it for a bird on his neck? What is that thing around his neck? After doing some research, come to find out that the charm is actually the Egyptian god Horus. Jacob the Jeweler made the piece for Kanye for a reasonable price of $300,000. Jacob also made Kanye a pyramid ring, but I digress back to this Horus fellow. Horus, the son of Isis and of Osiris, was a god whose attributes appealed strongly to the Egyptians from one end of Egypt to the other, because in him every man and woman saw the type of what he or she wished to possess, that is to say, renewed life, and life as opposed to death, and movement as opposed to inactivity*. So what does that mean for Kanye? He’s gone through a lot of things; is he celebrating life over death or is he celebrating a renewed-ness of himself? 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Jesus said that “I come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”, so as far as I am concerned, Kanye could have kept his Jesus piece on, yet he didn’t. I could be reading too deep into this, but I just find it a bit strange. Was Kanye even serious about his Christianity to begin with or was Jesus just used to sell records, as so many other artists, including gospel ones used Jesus for that same purpose? And the song is about power, what kind of power? People like to read lyrics, but the lyrics to this song don’t tell the story like the video does, nor do these lyrics tell the story like the lyrics of the remix, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
The next thing that I want to point out is the woman sitting in front of Kanye with the wings…is she suppose to be an angel or something? She is sitting to Kanye’s left and she has four wings. I wonder is there any significance to the wings. I don’t want to give a teaching on angels but angels do appear all through the Bible. They were messengers, they carried out judgments and they ministered to Jesus. The classifications given for angels were expressed in books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. Isaiah talks about the Seraphim, who acted as attendants at the throne of God and agents of cleansing; described as 6 winged human-like creatures**. Ezekiel speaks about the Cherubim in Chapters 1 and 10. What is interesting is that in his descriptions, the Cherubim had four wings – two to cover its body and two to fly (Ezekiel 1:11). The angel in front of Kanye to the left had four wings as well – let us say that this angel is indeed a Cherubim. What are the Cherubim; the Cherubim are higher ranking angels – they serve as the guardians of the holiness of God. Kanye appears to be a god-like figure in this video standing between the pillars surrounded by angels; was this Cherubim there to represent itself as a guardian of Kanye’s holiness as a new or renewed man? In case you weren’t aware, Satan was the chief Cherubim – the highest of them all before his fall. Is there any connection? Maybe, maybe not; who really knows, just food for thought.
Next, the two horned creatures on each side of Kanye…what is that about? I actually don’t know who or what these creatures are. Now if you notice, the two creatures are identical. Common sense led me to wonder if this creature was connected to Horus. So, I did my research and interestingly enough there were two female horned goddesses connected to Horus: Isis and Hathor. Isis is depicted as a woman wearing a vulture head-dress and the solar disk between a pair of horns – which is sometimes underneath the symbol of her name, “the throne***.”
“Isis was a vital link between the gods and mankind…In the Book of the Dead, Isis is regarded as the giver of life and food to the dead. She may also be one of the judges of the dead” http://www.egyptianmyths.net/isis.htm.
Hathor is the horned cow-goddess of love – early she was considered the mother or Horus but later Isis considered the role – and her name means “house of Horus****.”
“It was said that when a child was born, Seven Hathors came to his bedside to announce his fate. The Seven Hathors were believed to know the future and the moment of death for every Egyptian. A person’s destiny depended on the hour of their death and the luck of ill-fortune was connected with it. It was believed that the Hathors would exchange a prince born to ill-fortune with a more fortunate child, therefore protecting the dynasty and the nation. The Hathors were shown as a group of young women playing tambourines and wearing the disk and horns of Hathor” (http://www.egyptianmyths.net/hathor.htm).
The interesting thing here is that as the video continues with its progression, there are two more horned creatures, identical to the two on each side of Kanye. I know that the myth called for 7 Hathors and there are only four horned creatures, but there are more creatures represented as women throughout the video. In fact the only two men in the entire video in addition to Kanye and those are the men with the swords. Did this creatures/goddess hold the knowledge of what was going to happen to Kanye? Were they the ones who ushered Kanye into the newness of renewed-ness of life?
Lastly, I want to mention; the “killing” of Kanye. There was a sword over his head coming through a halo, and two beings with swords aiming for Kanye’s head as the video ends. There are a lot of assumptions that can be made here and I have made a few so far. So let me start with sword over Kanye’s head. There is a story, the Sword of Damocles. The story goes that a man was a subject to a king and he envied the king for his power. So the king allowed the subject and himself to switch for a day. The subject was happy with the power and respect that he had until at a dinner banquet, he noticed in a glance upward that there was a sword above the subject’s head hanging by a horse hair and immediately, he didn’t want to be king any longer. The moral of the story – what good is power and authority when you live in fear of your death; as king, you can die at any moment, even with power, respect and authority. Ah, maybe Kanye isn’t a deity after all – a king maybe? Well, with the “Horus Piece” around his neck, maybe he evokes the spirit of the Egyptian kings who believed that they were gods or that once they died, they became gods. There is a term, regicide, and it means the deliberate killing of a monarch. Does Kanye view himself as a King or Deity? Why Kanye would want to be killed is a good question; is his monarch-deity greater in death than in life? There is an album cover. I used it as my picture in the previous post about the video. In the picture is Kanye’s head with a crown over it laying sideways on a block of concrete with a sword aimed straight in his ear…It is safe to say that Kanye sees himself as the king. So why kill the king? There is reference to a Masonic ritual – King-Kill/33; particularly speaking about the ritual of killing JFK – See James Shelby Downard with Michael A. Hoffman II, http://www.revisionisthistory.org/kingkill33.html. So my question of all questions is what does it all mean? How does the king get killed if he is guarded by the Cherub and is surrounded by the renewed-ness of Horus? The hook says no one man should have all this power – my guess is that Kanye means that he should cross over to a deity; his death – a beautiful death (jumping out the window) – is that of a human one, taking all this power out of the hands of a man and placing it back into the hands of one who deserves all this power, a god or deity. Does Kanye see himself as that god or deity? Not sure, but the analysis of the research on this video possibly suggests that Kanye underwent a death only to return more powerful than before. At the end of the day, this video suggests a lot. Do the research and come to your own conclusions.
I apologize for such a lengthy commentary but I needed to provide context and research to my argument/opinion. I will leave you with one last thing. I talked earlier about the lyrics of the Power Remix…yes there is a remix. At the beginning of this article I talked about Jay-Z and Kanye. Well, guess who is on the remix? I am sure many of you checked out Kanye’s lyrics to Power. Well, check out the words to the Power Remix. Below is the song to be played for your listening pleasure.

The link for the lyrics is also included here for you to follow along with the song – http://www.killerhiphop.com/kanye-west-jay-z-power-remix-lyrics/. Listen yourself and you come up with your own conclusions.

* E.A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians or Studies in Egyptian Mythology, Volume 1, pages 486-487, The Open Court Publishing Company, London, 1904.
** Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth, page 148, Moody Press, Chicago, 1999.
*** http://www.egyptianmyths.net/isis.htm
**** http://www.egyptianmyths.net/hathor.htm

© ClarkMiller Publishing

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