Watch Kanye & Rick Rubin’s Wacky 808 Acceptance Speech At Tribeca Film’s Disruptive Innovation Awards
Every year, the people behind the Tribeca Film Festival also hold the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards, a ceremony designed to honor “those whose ideas have broken the mold to create significant impact.” This year, one of the honorees is the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine, an iconic beat-programming gadget that did a ton to help develop the sound of rap music, among other genres. Kanye West and Rick Rubin, two men who have made a ton of noise with the 808, are accepting the award for the machine at tomorrow night’s ceremony, but they won’t be there in person. Instead, they teamed up with the great music video director Mark Romanek to make an exceedingly strange chopped-up minute-and-a-half “acceptance speech” that attempts to honor the brutal low-tech sampling capabilities of the 808 by mimicking them. Check it out below.
Alternate title for that video: 808s & Eyeball Ruptures.