Kanye West - Dark Twisted Fantasy

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.

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"

― aerosmith: the acid house years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:52 AM (49 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah this kinda sounds right (to someone who merely spectated the indies going ham for MPP).

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

srsly h8 to break this to you friend but that's just you getting older

yeah max is basically agreeing with us but putting exclamation points on it to indicate that he's excited, not annoyed or depressed, by it. (xpost)

how is max agreeing w/ you?

he's saying that kanye's whole THING is making the presentation of his art as important as the art, which i also think but don't think is especially exciting or cool

it's cool and exciting when it works, kind of like ANYTHING is cool and exciting when it works, and that's the big divisive point re: this album I think

haven't read the thread, but is anyone denying this?

― BIG MUFFIN (gbx), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:47 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

it seems to me that Al is denying that the music is at all related to the framing, or thinks that you can divorce the two; theyre inseparable & u cant remove the context

which i also think but don't think is especially exciting or cool

i dont think that either, personally, but i can totally see why ppl do, which is what i thought we were arguing about. while u and lex go around being like SHEEPLE!! about it

been thinking about making a poll of Kanye videos because while almost all of them are creative and surprising on some level, only a couple of them really work for me as music videos, which is kinda also the way i feel about the crazy album covers, goofy outfits, etc.

im not really saying that hes making the presentation of his art "as important" as the art, im saying that the presentation is the art, inseparable from the content. (this may not seem like a distinction to you but it is an important one to me!) i dont know how i "feel" about it, i just think walking down the style/substance duality road takes us too far away from what kanyes doing here, if that makes sense

i was gonna do a poll of kanye track codas

I don't actually know why I actively dislike like 4 songs on here but find the other 7 good enough to more than make up for them, but that's the reaction I'm having

I like a lot of the mish-mash melange of ideas and it kind of cracks me up that Kanye decided that thematic continuity would be best served by emo guitar solos

see i don't necessarily think the framing is that inseparable from the album because for all we know, 90% of this album was done before he decided to give it the weird long title and the crazy gross cover art -- i know i already said this but i could easily see this exact same album being called Good Ass Job and having a bear on the cover.

Is this guy ever going to release a video (and not a lol 35 min thing)? That's half of what I love about Kanye. The videos were all I really liked about 808.

yeah i really disagree w/ that! i think the way these songs ended up is pretty difft from the way they leaked as 'good friday' entries too xp

it seems to me that Al is denying that the music is at all related to the framing, or thinks that you can divorce the two; theyre inseparable & u cant remove the context

ehhhhhhhhhhh dunno about this. i mean, i get how the two are inseparable, to an extent, but let's be real the fact that this is a BFD to the listening public is because it's Kanye, not because he's reached dizzying new heights of maximalism. which, now that i think about it, is maybe what max is saying??

imo all ambitious albums court/curry a similar vibe from people who want albums to matter more than they actually do in the broader scheme of things - the ambition of any given album qua content is mainly of interest to butterfly-collecting types who think about the actual album as a discreet self-contained object whereas in the broader universe these ambitions serve mainly the function of cementing/expanding celebrity & status & most people won't ever really examine the things that constitute "an ambitious album" - to make "an ambitious album" & succeed in communicating having-been-ambitious is to succeed, full stop, because it accomplishes the celeb/status goals

nb I believe in kanye west as an artist & number him among the butterfly-collector types in the above schema, I just think that this particular level of the game - what the acutal ambitions of an album are - barely figure into the q at all except for artists & the nerds who care about artists' work

so deej argues that these two aspects -- an ambitious album as an artistic work & an ambitious album as, essentially, a gesture of pop-cultural pertinence -- are "inseparable"; I'm internally conditioned to have deep suspicions of any assertion that content is inseparable from anything, ever, that smacks of discredited late-90s crit-theory claims to me

also while I'm here I want to say the last blut aus nord didn't really hold up on listening to it this morning, maybe you have to be high to love it, peace everybody

wait are we all saying the same thing?¿?¿?¿

Is this guy ever going to release a video (and not a lol 35 min thing)? That's half of what I love about Kanye. The videos were all I really liked about 808.

Do you specifically mean a video for "Runaway" or a video for a song on this album? Because there is one for "Power" and it's bad-ass

ehhhhhhhhhhh dunno about this. i mean, i get how the two are inseparable, to an extent, but let's be real the fact that this is a BFD to the listening public is because it's Kanye, not because he's reached dizzying new heights of maximalism. which, now that i think about it, is maybe what max is saying??

― BIG MUFFIN (gbx), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 11:08 AM (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

its what im saying too...?

yeah i really disagree w/ that! i think the way these songs ended up is pretty difft from the way they leaked as 'good friday' entries too xp

― challop and a muff (deej), Tuesday, November 23, 2010 12:07 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

besides the "Runaway" single mix/album version thing and the Ross verse added to that one song, what are the big differences? i'm asking seriously, i didn't follow all the leaks really closely.

i know i already said this but i could easily see this exact same album being called Good Ass Job and having a bear on the cover.

AND it would be just as big a deal w/the public and critics if that was the case

see i don't necessarily think the framing is that inseparable from the album because for all we know, 90% of this album was done before he decided to give it the weird long title and the crazy gross cover art -- i know i already said this but i could easily see this exact same album being called Good Ass Job and having a bear on the cover.

― some dude, Tuesday, November 23, 2010 12:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i guess my point is kind of that the album wasnt actually "90% done" if he hadnt given it the title and the cover art and put on the big ass egyptian chain & everything. and for that matter that calling it "good ass job" and having a bear on the cover would have made it a v. different album. but i can feel myself getting into pedantic college frosh mode here so ill stop myself. generally speaking i dont see this album being called good ass job and having a bear on the cover. kanye takes himself too seriously for that shit now.