The music video for "Good Life" was directed by Jonas & François with animation by So-Me. The video premiered on September 11, 2007 as MTV Jams' "Jam of the Week". It features West and T-Pain performing with animated backdrops and often mouthing the words of the song lyrics, which appear in large letters. The version of the song used in the video contains an additional twenty-three second intro that the album version does not have. The video also features rapper/model LoLa Monroe.
The video has reached #4 so far on VH1's VSpot Top 20 Countdown. It ranked #40 on VH1's "Top 40 Videos of 2007." The video was the recipient of several awards nominations, winning "Best Hip-Hop Video" at the BET Hip Hop Awards and "Best Special Effects in a Video" at the MTV Video Music Awards.
The music video for this song once again is very well done but you wouldn’t expect anything less when it comes to Kanye West. He is a master when it comes to art and how things look in his music videos. Throughout the song Kanye West and T Pain remain two black and white figures and the models that also appear in the video remain black and white figures. All the way through the video little moments happen and when these moments seem to happen they appear in colour with whoever is rapping or singing remaining in black and white. Most of the time the song changes from a white back ground to a black background. The white background is used for most of the video but towards the end of the video a black background appears and is used until the video ends. When some of the colours came into the video they were very bright. I found colours were used a lot when they had a subtitled sequence. The five colours I noticed throughout the video were red, pink, green, yellow, light blue and dark blue.
Another key thing I noticed in the video is that there is a CD that Kanye West has in his hands and on the front cover there is a picture of a teddy bear that has passed his graduation. Now any true Kanye West fan knows that the bear in the video is the one used on the front cover of his album titled Graduation. He also used teddy bears on his first two albums titled The College Dropout, Late Registration, There for Graduation being the final in the series.
The only thing that puts me off about the song is T Pain. I am not a big fan of him at all. He uses auto tune all the time so I don’t know when I listen to him if he has talent or not because he has never done a song without auto tune. This makes me wonder what is so special about him and why do rappers use him on hooks on their songs.
The song was very popular in America and on the Billboard Hot 100 it came in on number 7. The song sold 1 million copies in America and went platinum. The song didn’t do so well in the UK and charted at number 23.
The song on YouTube has been watched 29,880,114 times which is pretty good seeing as the song came out in 2007. The song on YouTube also has 36,835 likes and 914 dislikes which is very good seeing as the video has been out for 5 years. I found the video on YouTube, Daily Motion, Vevo, MySpace and Kanye West.com.
If there was one thing I could change about the video I would get rid of T Pain and actually use someone who has a better voice and can actually sing. Probably someone like Ne Yo, because in 2007 Ne Yo was at the height of his popularity or maybe even Rihanna she has a good voice. But then I ask myself if it would have worked if a female singer worked on the hook of the song. It would have been interesting to see because Rihanna is getting more and more popular and at that time she was just about to become really famous with the song Umbrella.
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