Kanye West - Dark Twisted Fantasy

i also like the geo/topographic view of music history bcuz it allows for subjectivity of the listener -- we both look at the same mountain, acknowledge 'hey thats a really big mountain,' but have difft perspectives on what exactly the mountain is like & how it impacts us

basically there's not much here that's a surprise from kanye, either sonically or lyrically - i get the impression that he's running out of ideas here, not going further out with them

i'm with ship - i don't get how this is all that prog? kanye's always had maximalist tendencies and made his name with a big, fairly opulent sound - 808s was a huge anomaly and why it actually seemed like a creative thing for him to have done. i mean, you have long-ass songs that don't do anything with their length except drag, and like 50 famous singers on one song that may as well have been billed kanye ft. rihanna and fergie for all the difference they make

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:26 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

he was always making albums packed with 9-min songs full of instrumental flourishes & solos? successive posse cuts from multi-genre artists?

I would say that, narratively, there's a big difference between a band or artist that gets pegged as "prog" early on, and one that becomes "prog" at a certain stage in a career, maybe goes through a "progressive phase" — the latter story seeming to invoke (whether for critical or celebratory ends) a historical concept of "progressive" rock as excessive deviation from the straight path of "rock" strictu sensu, while the former basically suggests that this new band reminds people of old bands they might like.

i dont think hes running out of ideas at all -- hes just coming up w/ ones that dont particularly interest me. see, i think u guys are denying the mountain in front of you, arguing its a hill, instead of just saying "i prefer my mountains look differently"

you guys = lex & al

cant wait til kanye enters the jazz odyssey portion of his career

deej I don't think anybody gets your mountain analogy

NO ONE REALLY THINKS THIS IS "PROG"

its obv just a shortcut for saying long songs + self-indulgence

duh

I sorta got it but now this stuff about ppl "denying the mountain" has thrown me a bit

+ "there's a King Crimson sample on one song"

i get it deej's analogy

i also can't write sentences

got into trouble one time for denying the mountain in mont blanc

he should have just filled every extra three minutes of no rapping tacked onto the end of songs with twista verses

he was always making albums packed with 9-min songs full of instrumental flourishes & solos? successive posse cuts from multi-genre artists?

the nine-minute song here is an anomaly even by this album's standards and doesn't have any more ideas than the original 5 1/2 min version of it - and yeah, he pretty much has always done 5-6min songs full of lavish flourishes. "we major" beats the shit out of anything on MBDTF.

multi-genre artist collaborations are kinda par for the course for most mainstream pop stars right now, and obv he's always done posse cuts.

its obv just a shortcut for saying long songs + self-indulgence

yeah this, but the self-indulgence remains mostly thematic not musical right? kanye's music just isn't complex

yeah this, but the self-indulgence remains mostly thematic not musical right? kanye's music just isn't complex

neither are his themes!

I sorta got it but now this stuff about ppl "denying the mountain" has thrown me a bit

― underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:32 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i just mean it seems obvious to me that there is this huge thing in front of us, and we can criticize it for lots of things, but denying that it is in fact an ambitious, important, interesting album seems like denying the obvious thing in front of our faces. regardless of quality

yeah this, but the self-indulgence remains mostly thematic not musical right? kanye's music just isn't complex

― Noel 1 Kanye 10.0 (blueski), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:35 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wait, is complexity a rockist red herring or not?

did you not hear late registration - HE MAKES MUSIC THAT IS LIKE CRACK. COMPLEX.

We won't have a conclusive verdict on this until Geir pops up to declare it the best hip-hop album ever made, right?

n/a — then the interesting question would be when/how "prog"-as-derogatory-shorthand is used — why do Kanye's long songs and self-indulgence set off the prog detector, but Destroyer's Rubies or Sufjan Stevens don't? also, when did "prog" come to fill this role?

ambitious? maybe so, it tries very hard to be a Grand Statement anyway
important? insofar as any album by a pop star of kanye's stature is important, yes
interesting? not really! this i would totally dispute.

i didn't say his themes were complex, just that the music would have to be (more than it is) for the prog tag to make sense/be useful

but Destroyer's Rubies or Sufjan Stevens don't? also, when did "prog" come to fill this role?

― underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:39 AM (25 seconds ago) Bookmark

ha for lex they prob do!

deej — feels like you are basically arguing for a 'hermeneutic circle' — I feel u bro

what would kanye west have to do to make his music (or his themes) more "complex"? (srs question — just want a reference point for who y'all think is doing these things better)

isn't sufjan stevens just like common-or-garden indie rock moping?

i have never heard of "destroyer's rubies"

I was always hoping that Edan would make the great prog rap album. Def Jux died before doing so and RZA hasn't made a great break since Run afaik so... it's just not happening is it. Unless Kanye already has.

i'm not nec asking kanye to make his ideas more complex

destroyer's rubies is an album by Destroyer aka Dan Bejar, sometimes of the band The New Pornographers. the record got a lot of love on ILX in 2006 or 07. it opens with a 9.5-minute-long song, but an awesome one so it's okay

sufjan stevens is notoriously baroque, in a midwestern-american-community-theater stylee

lex Destroyer's Rubies is the og omgomgomgomgpitchforkaregoingtogivethisrecorda10.0

you will hate it like Kanye hates the Paparazzi - i.e. worse than the Nazis.

i am pretty sure kanye loves the paparazzi

I feel like somehow "glam" always overshadowed "prog" w/r/t Destroyer genre-associations — but that's another story

well either way you certainly will not like Destroyer. I'd bet my life savings on it (says the dude in two overdrafts).

i just mean it seems obvious to me that there is this huge thing in front of us, and we can criticize it for lots of things, but denying that it is in fact an ambitious, important, interesting album seems like denying the obvious thing in front of our faces. regardless of quality

― challop and a muff (deej), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:37 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

haven't read the thread, but is anyone denying this? i literally give zero shits about this album, and will maybe steal it from the internet in a while, but i already know that lots of ppl aren't gonna shut up about it, that a 42-guest star track is notable (even impressive) even if it sucks (esp if it sucks!), and that pretending that this isn't ambitious is sorta challopy. i mean, ffs, it's ambitious in the purest sense of the word, in a way---kanye is the most ambitious man in showbiz, inasmuch as he explicitly desires to be considered The Greatest Talent Of All Time.

xps oops well i guess this is moot

i just mean it seems obvious to me that there is this huge thing in front of us, and we can criticize it for lots of things, but denying that it is in fact an ambitious, important, interesting album seems like denying the obvious thing in front of our faces. regardless of quality

― challop and a muff (deej), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 11:37 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well it being "huge" is self-evident. i guess i just see this as business as usual from an artist whose whole aesthetic is about FEELING bigger and better and more important and interesting every time -- it's more the packaging than the content that's giving people that feeling, is my argument here.

xpost to gbx saying something similar

maybe we should actually be calling this album glam-rap

(oh never mind, just googled and apparently this term has already been used... by mickey avalon, about himself. gonna go vom now)

i mean i do find over-the-top attempts at grandeur interesting, sure -- i bought Chinese Democracy on the release date after all. but i also acknowledged its failures and didn't let it anywhere near my top 10 at the end of the year.

but surely there is a difference between the monumental dead letter that is Chinese Democracy and Kanye West as "going concern"/trending twitter topic/celebrity guest host/etc

for some reason the discourse around the hugeness of this album is sounding like the general-public version of the indie disourse around the MPP "moment"

We won't have a conclusive verdict on this until Geir pops up to declare it the best hip-hop album ever made, right?

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_IC0Iil_WPXU/TOaKTFMqUbI/AAAAAAAAAjM/Bz8UQ0qB3MU/1290165886_rsd4rn.gif

kanye set off a bomb mang, we're all just riding unchill shockwaves now

it's more the packaging than the content that's giving people that feeling, is my argument here.

the packaging is the content!!!

i mean i KNOW what that sounds like but... thats kanyes whole THING since at least graduation

i already know that lots of ppl aren't gonna shut up about it

idk whether it's my imagination but the hype cycle of people-not-shutting-up-about-certain-albums has seemed particularly annoying in 2010

Ambition or 'importance' doesn't mean shit to me if it sucks. And considering we live in a word where you can avoid anything you want to and ubiquity is dead, trying to make things like MGLTF stick just comes off p stupid to me.

Talking of which, I've been thinking of making a thread about what the 2010 summer jam was. Was there one? I heard that Katy Perry and Cee-Lo song like twice each.

but surely there is a difference between the monumental dead letter that is Chinese Democracy and Kanye West as "going concern"/trending twitter topic/celebrity guest host/etc

― underplayed junior boys remixes I have forgotten were on my comp (bernard snowy), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 11:51 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you're right, Use Your Illusion is a better reference point here (and is also an example of something bloated and often awful that I still enjoy more than this album).

the packaging is the content!!!

i mean i KNOW what that sounds like but... thats kanyes whole THING since at least graduation

mmm but the "packaging" on eg 808s actually did affect the content - ie the decision to sing through a vocoder and strip down the arrangements had a definite artistic effect - it wasn't just there for the sake of it. here, where the "packaging" = getting 50 famous names on one song, or extending the songs to tedious length, it pretty much adds nothing to the "content" because it sounds like an outtake from graduation with rihanna, fergie and a choir.