Year-End Critics' Polls '07

This guy needs to STFU.

Okay, I think I have completely different taste in Kanye then you, judging by what you think of those particular songs.

(Except for "Addiction" (shut up and stop being such a needy ass) and "Drive Slow" (one of his best songs)

1. stronger
2. good life
3. champion
4. can't tell me nothing
5. glory
6. good morning
7. flashing lights
8. barry bonds
9. everything i am
10. i wonder
11. big brother
12. homecoming

if that gives you any idea where i'm coming from

Does that mean you don't even rate "Drunk & Hot Girls"?

I'm not going to rank them, but I think every song on the album except maybe "Good Morning" is wonderful.

And "Good Morning" itself is fine, just not particularly exemplary.

haha 13. drunk and hot girls i forgot about it. i like how kanye goes "a-ROUSED" but that's about it.

"a-ROUSED" is from "I Wonder". "Drunk & Hot Girls" is actually probably one of my three favorite songs on the album. "Barry Bonds", too. Those two and "Can't Tell Me Nothing" form this great, dark, fucked-up mid-section.

there's lots of good uk indie i've only heard of little of/forgot existed on that FACT list: cajun dance party, foals, wild beasts.

I have massive issues with Stronger. I thought the fun of the Daft Punk song was its structure. How the words get 'faster' and finally dissolve into that beautiful riff towards the end is one of my favorite moments in music. It begs and answers whether the words or the sounds are more important. To make it a rap song misses that. The Kanye version is a bunch of ill conceived couplets -the guy can't rap, he really can't- over a version of a song that, to my mind at least, has had the soul ripped out of it. Which is how I feel about most of his music. It also irks me when people sample from songs that are mostly samples which Kanye does more than once, pretty sure he uses Public Enemy in a couple of places. And the line "You can be my black Kate Moss tonight" also unsettles me for some reason. I don't think it's a race thing, it just, I don't know... very upper middle class and a little stupid, a lot like collaborating with Chris Martin.

So I don't like Kanye West and I don't find his music particularly compelling. I'm all about soul music and his samples are are often a little too obvious. 'Touch The Sky' is Curtis Mayfield's 'Move On Up', Gold Digger is 'I Got A Woman', My Way Home is 'Home Is Where the Hatred Is' by however many people covered that. If you are used to those songs you feel a little put out of place, like the musical equivalent of film's uncanny valley. I have a feeling a compilation of all the sampled songs would far better than any Kanye Album. Steely Dan, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder, Can, Luther Vandross, Chairmen of the Board, etc, etc. They are all fantastic and not particularly obscure masterpieces shoved aside so Kanye can rap something trite, slightly smug, very poorly written and not fighting anything but his own ego.

Well said. I'd pipe in, but I feel bad about his mother.

I put Panda Bear on my MP3 player and listened to it again on the plane today. It's confirmed, the vocals really bug me. They sound distant and puny, unintelligible and annoying. Garbled vocals can sometimes work, like with Burial. But on Person Pitch the only emotional impact is irritation.

More pleasantly, I enjoyed these:
Modeselektor - Happy Birthday
Chloe - The Waiting Room
Muscles - Guns Babes Lemonade
Apparat - Walls
Matthew Dear - Asa Breed
Dan Deacon - Spiderman of the Rings

I think I might end up preferring them all over the LCD Soundsystem. I picked up a Rolling Stone at the airport for some mindless reading, laugh and cry at their top 50 albums. The Good 'n' Bad, Idolator stylee-

Good - Er...No real pleasant surprises until you get all the way to #16, Les Savy Fav, and #23 1990s. I nearly forgot about that album, good times. Of Montreal #41.

Bad - Let me count the ways. In a transparently insincere bid to remain hip and relevent, M.I.A. is #1. Rilo Kiley, Against Me!, NIN, McCartney, Linkin Park, Maroon 5, Smashing Pumpkins, Fall Out Boy, Dropkick Murphys, etc... Basically a list socially engineered for their demographic. Christgau, Fricke, Hoard and Sheffield list their personal favorites that would never be allowed onto herr Wenner's Masterlist. My favorite forced and contrived entry is Sheffield on The Liars - "These Berlin-based art-twat noise pervs sound like they're actually attempting to write catchy rock & roll songs - and listening to them try is even funnier than watching Manny Ramirez chase pop-ups." Nice Rob, wouldn't want to come off as too sincere. You like it as comedy, gotcha.

"a-ROUSED" is from "I Wonder". "Drunk & Hot Girls" is actually probably one of my three favorite songs on the album. "Barry Bonds", too. Those two and "Can't Tell Me Nothing" form this great, dark, fucked-up mid-section.

-- The Reverend, Friday, 14 December 2007 02:36 (4 hours ago) Link

haha, that's interesting, for me that whole section (really, everything after "Champion" and before "Flashing Lights") is one big no man's land where I'm either bored or annoyed and generally wishing I wasn't listening to the album at all.

^ i feel this way about everything post "flashing lights" except for "the glory"

I kinda agree with that too, but "Everything I Am" really grew on me and in general the last stretch is more pleasant at its worse than how much the middle section grates on me.

basically, wanted to love the album, thought i did, now idk i think it's 3.5/5. definitely a strong third album, but ive def heard at least 10 better records this year.

same here, except i kinda knew i wouldn't love it based on the advance singles, and only thought I did for like 2 listens.

I dunno, I've kind of had a really weird reaction to this album. For the first two months after it came out, I had the same kind of middling response that you guys have (hold up - didn't you have this in your CP top ten, Al?), but then it started making sense in ways it hadn't before. Even a month or so ago, when I first started trying to puzzle together a top ten, I had it posited at maybe 9 or 10, if it made the list at all. But then it got to where I want to listen to it twice in a row every day, and I never do that with albums. It's kind of freaking me out, really.

I feel he's found not necessarily found the perfect mid-point between the aw-shucks warmth of Dropout and the international assholism of Registration, but rather mastered their use, learning how and when to perfectly play them against each other or completely drop one for the other. (Note, that last third he pretty much cuts the ego out entirely and thus is the most sympathetic he's been since his debut.) And the production just fucking slays me. The synthesizers are so fucking audacious and in your face, but its always buoyant or sensitive or intense enough that it never feels cold and repellent the way the back half of Registration did.

hm. i disagree re: the beats. i think my ultimate problem is that i feel let down by the fact that this is his least sonically interesting album. like once i got over "oh synths hm?" i just kinda got... bored. and even though i like kanye as an mc, he isn't carrying songs with so-so beats on graduation like he did with, idk, "spaceship"

you say audacious, i say harsh :/

you say cocks i say COCKS

it was at #10 on a list I turned in last month, yes, definitely not in my top 10 anymore.

"Spaceship" has a great beat. That's kind of interesting about the synth thing, I HATE the way he used them on Registration, but here they are just beautiful.

stephen otm

Also, I think he's learned not to sound so fucking pleased with himself. (He still does, but not to the point where I want to slap him, you know?)

I almost liked the 'Can't Tell Me Nothing' hype mixtape more than the Graduation itself. The last verse of 'Us Placers' is perhaps the most poignant thing he's done (and it helps it isn't him).

Also I can't get behind Muscles probably because he is irritating live and I've seen him a bunch of times now. Battles neither, 'Atlas' reminds me too much of 'Doctorin' The Tardis' and the rest of the album comes off as pointless as the height of that cymbal.

Stuff I liked:
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Burial - Untrue
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Ricardo Villalobos - Fabric36
Studio - West Coast
Justice - Cross
Chromatics – Night Drive

Which is far less traditional indie rock/pop than the last couple of years. Fun fact: The highest selling independently released record of 2007 was the Eagles - Long Road Out Of Eden.

^those are all pretty good albums except radiohead.

rev, i never really was as turned off by his egotism as seemingly everyone else, and idk really why that is.

The last verse of 'Us Placers' is perhaps the most poignant thing he's done (and it helps it isn't him).

Wait, are you calling Pharrell poignant? Remind me never to take anything you have to say seriously.

haha that really confused me cuz i had didn't remember who had the last verse on that song so i didnt know if he meant kanye was like out of character "not him" or what

you know who had to die for these ice creams?
these bapes, these gold chains?
clothing production is not nice, but mean

~~~^^^lol pharell parody verse lol^^^~~~

Every time someone calls Pharrell "poignant", god sews through a little girl in Nicaragua's hand.

/\ Holy shit, Rev.

what's his verse even about? at these stages in their careers, i couldn't even imagine the hilarity that would ensue over the course of a kanye-pharell-lupe super-group super-album.

(Pharrell)
G.R.I.P P.I.M.P
I, any spelling ***** come on that’s me
I bring a burning sensation to the urban eye
Like an eye-drop of Turpentine
You can listen to the serpent, fine
But the earth got gas once it burps its fine
Someone around me they talk about the grease
Not G.H.G, how to cook a quarter ki
Talking all nasal, he aint over that cold
No glove scrub, Manny just over that stove
Perfect paradigm
Wrong place wrong time
Should have been Phizer, GlaxoSmithKline
Number one chemist
Look at him no blemish
Egg shell off white like a DuPont finish
Young, dumb, high strung, who could handle us
I wonder how Gods gon’ paint today’s canvasses
Cause who knew that day that man would just
Go to VA with a Tec and spray campuses
What a way to see the cover of Time
I know that ***** wish he was standing in line
To see it….As if he didn’t do it.

Lupe's a great rapper who got lost on a venture up his own ass.

yup.

and wack beats with wacker hooks.

It's Dormitory Hip-hop.

you made that pharrell verse up right? "but the earth got gas once it burps it's fine"????

is that even the worse line??

No! That's the actual verse in question.

poignant is really the only word that comes to mind.

"Egg shell off white like a DuPont finish
Young, dumb, high strung, who could handle us"

Makes me tear up. It's like listening to Time Of Your Life.

(See what I did there? A little thread-mix and matchin.)

"Young, dumb, high strung, who could handle us
I wonder how Gods gon’ paint today’s canvasses
Cause who knew that day that man would just
Go to VA with a Tec and spray campuses"

this rhyme structure is actually pretty def, too bed the words are indescribably bad.

deft*

Perfect paradigm
Wrong place wrong time
Should have been Phizer, GlaxoSmithKline

Kanye could never elicit this kind of emotion.

Hey Reverend. I was as surprised at the pharell verse as you should be.

http://bp0.blogger.com/_bJX2ryvw3U8/RiWKkS0gFOI/AAAAAAAAAQc/zhIT9VVCHZY/s400/pfft.jpeg

Look, I didn’t say it was the best thing ever. I think it ends well.

Are you really making a case for Kanye as a lyricist here? Come on... the guy can barely make the last syllable match the next last syllable and when it does, it's all cloud/proud, oft/soft and the number of times he rhymes 'me' with 'me'...

Out of interest, does anyone think Kanye has any strength in this?