444 - "FATHER": A symbolic analysis of Kanye West’s song and music video
The Symbolic World
Jonathan Pageau
4.8 • 933 Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/BG2psRcPH7o
My review of Ye's album Bully: https://x.com/PageauJonathan/status/2038374009382097289
Ye: Father music video: https://youtu.be/HBMy-y2wb4I?si=OKlf4_0c8y1zJwV1
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | with Yewest's new album, Bully, having finally come out after what two years of waiting, |
| 0:05.5 | I put up a review on social media. You can go and check that out if you're interested, |
| 0:11.6 | but since I put out that review, so many people have asked me to comment on and try to help |
| 0:19.1 | people understand the video father, which you put up with the release of the |
| 0:23.5 | album. And so I thought it could be a fun thing to do because it is, of course, relevant to |
| 0:30.2 | symbolic thinking. And so the first thing to say, and maybe we can do this in a way that will also |
| 0:36.4 | be a kind of training on how to |
| 0:38.8 | interpret things, you know, I'll take you to the process, not only give you my interpretation, |
| 0:43.6 | but take it to the process of interpreting it, so that hopefully this can be useful for you |
| 0:47.9 | when you're trying to interpret songs or videos or whatever it is you want to interpret on your own. |
| 1:04.7 | Music or videos or whatever it is you want to interpret on your own. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. |
| 1:18.6 | Yeah. Welcome to the symbolic world. And so the first thing to say is that the style of the video is quite surrealist, |
| 1:24.6 | which means that there's a kind of absurdity to the way in which it is done. |
| 1:29.2 | It's not a straightforward logical narrative. It is a series of tableaus, which is that there's |
| 1:34.9 | a series of events that happen, which are not reasonable, that are kind of surreal in that sense. |
| 1:42.4 | And so that will, of course, affect the way that we interpret the video. There are many type of surreal in that sense. And so that will, of course, affect the way that we interpret the |
| 1:45.1 | video. There are many type of surrealist, let's say, approaches that in some ways try to resist |
| 1:52.9 | interpretation, that is by using things that don't make sense and putting them together, |
| 1:57.8 | it is a deliberate attempt to resist meaning and to resist interpretation. |
| 2:02.8 | Of course, ultimately, you can't completely resist meaning. You will still nonetheless be |
| 2:07.4 | suggesting things by the analogies that you're bringing up in the video. And I think in this |
| 2:12.0 | video, it's pretty clear what the video is about. And so, of course, the video is an AI video, which helps us, which is related to the |
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