new vid - "No Church in the Wild" - The Tudors
No Church in the Wild
Fandom: The Tudors
Song/Artist: No Church in the Wild by Jay-Z and Kanye West
Duration: 4:02 minutes
Summary: Dieu et mon droit.
Spoilers: Whole series
A festivids treat for destina.
Password: fv13
Human beings in a mob
What’s a mob to a king?
What’s a king to a god?
What’s a god to a non-believer?
Who don’t believe in anything?
We make it out alive
All right, all right
No church in the wild
Tears on the mausoleum floor
Blood stains the coliseum doors
Lies on the lips of a priest
Thanksgiving disguised as a feast
Rollin’ in the Rolls-Royce Corniche
Only the doctors got this, I’m hidin’ from police
Cocaine seats
All white like I got the whole thing bleached
Drug dealer chic
I’m wonderin’ if a thug’s prayers reach
Is Pious pious cause God loves pious?
Socrates asks, “Whose bias do y’all seek?”
All for Plato, screech
I’m out here ballin’, I know y’all hear my sneaks
Jesus was a carpenter, Yeezy, laid beats
Hova flow the Holy Ghost, get the hell up out your seats
Preach
I live by you, desire
I stand by you, walk through the fire
Your love is my scripture
Let me into your encryption
Sunglasses and Advil
Last night was mad real
Sun comin’ up, 5 a.m.
I wonder if they got cabs still
Thinkin’ ’bout the girl in all-leopard
Who was rubbin’ the wood like Kiki Shepard
Two tattoos, one read “No Apologies”
The other said “Love is cursed by monogamy”
That’s somethin’ that the pastor don’t preach
That’s somethin’ that a teacher can’t teach
When we die, the money we can’t keep
But we probably spend it all ’cause the pain ain’t cheap
Preach
I really got into Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies, but since the BBC series is still in development (Mark Rylance confirmed as Cromwell, ZOMG!!) and the RSC productions are taking their sweet time transferring to London, I had to make do with rewatching The Tudors instead.
I have much frustration with the show, but there were plenty of great things about it too, for example the amazing scene of Death riding out for Henry in the final episode. That image struck me as some sort of overall comment on Henry’s motivations behind the Reformation, the six wives, the countless beheadings and burnings and hanging/quartering/drawings, behind the utter tragic farce of so many events in his lifetime.
Of course it’s much too reductive to say it all boils down to a fear - nay, an absolute terror - of facing one’s inevitable death, but that was one of the core ideas that I wanted to draw out. The song ends in an odd coda, but instead of editing it out, I figured I might as well go even further with the weirdness/wankiness of pairing The Tudors with Kanye/Jay Z and invoke that famous cinema metaphor of life after death, the final scene from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. IDEK. Just go with it.