The Thread Where We List The People Who Put Kanye As Their Token Rap Album on an indiecentric top 10 2004 list

Gregory Conner, Tufts Observer

http://www.tuftsobserver.org/arts/20041210/top_10_albums_of_2004.html

Brian Wilson—SMILE: What can I say about SMILE that hasn’t been said?

Arcade Fire—Funeral: Ah, PitchforkMedia.com. At times I find it disturbing that I have a strong relationship with a website...

Interpol—Antics

Wilco—A Ghost is Born: Thirteen minutes of something that sounds like a room full of refrigerators! What was Wilco thinking!?

Loretta Lynn—Van Lear Rose: To be honest, I probably would have never picked this record up if it wasn’t for Jack White...

Green Day—American Idiot: This was the surprise of 2004 for me.

Franz Ferdinand—Franz Ferdinand: This album was even better before I heard “Take Me Out” so many times I became nauseous at the sound of its first guitar flourish.

Iron and Wine—Our Endless Numbered Days: Singer-songwriters may have the hardest job in music. It is up to only them whether they succeed or fail; they have no band to pick up the slack or superstar producer to save them with a new beat.

Kanye West—College Dropout: The rap album of the year.

The Hives—Tyrannosaurus Hives

Kanye West—College Dropout: The rap album of the year.

vs

Loretta Lynn—Van Lear Rose: To be honest, I probably would have never picked this record up if it wasn’t for Jack White...

the word "college" is in the title. He uses his full name. It's laudibly gangsta-free. It has a hefty promotional budget. Release the same album as Kay-Way's Ballz Up In Dat II: The Unchallenged Greatest with a picture of Kay-Way holding a shotgun and see if it does as well critically.

(some of my best friends are kanye fans. I kinda like "All Falls Down" and "Workout Plan" - can't stand the chipmunk hits)

Bingo. Hey Outkast was my number #3 last year! And I like the sloppy-ass Prince-rip disc more than the rap one!

ah, but the non-andre hippity-hop was present in my singles list ("Get Low" and "Faint") and album list (northern state)

i don't know a single country fan who would say the same of loretta's album.

One my best friends in town would say the same thing (so will Xgau!).

I wonder how many people who love hiphop would also find valuable an 'indiecentric' 2004 top 10 list

hey, I voted for Devin AND Kanye! where's my laudibly non-gangsta prize?

http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~mbarret1/Graphics/berkely03/gangsta.jpg

(xp stevie: I really dreaded this, y'know)

-- What's this place, Biblevania? (natepatri...), December 30th, 2004.

Nate is pretty OTM, especially there. and Anthony, are you actually using that asshole Byron Crawford to back up your point?

ANYway - other than that Al, I agree w/ you and Nate, and I think the Kanye album is pretty damn great on the whole - and no, many of the album tracks are just as strong as the singles ("we don't care," "family business" "Two Words" etc.)

Moving on:

yeah the kanye rhetoric is quite possible by far the most fucking absurd i've seen around any hip-hop record ever, outdoing speakerboxx/thelovebelow, outdoing lauryn, outdoing 16 years of 'nation of millions' hyberbole even maybe (ok maybe not that).

Huh? So Rocafella convinced a bunch of corny rock fans that they were listening to backpacker rap bcuz kanye doesn't talk about guns. The "Not since de la soul and public enemy!" rhetoric is stupid, but it always is - this is just another of countless examples.

all the rockcrits feeling icky about getting gop cooties from country and then rallying around fucking "jesus walks" is fucking insane.

Maybe ILM/the blogosphere is somewhat to the left of the critical mainstream but shit - the country poseurism that I sense - and I want to make it clear I'm not calling anyone out, it is just highly suspicious when suddenly everyone jumps on the mainstream-country-is-so-great bandwagon when chuck eddy mentions how good big and rich are - seems pretty fucking pervasive around here. In fact, I'd say Big & Rich would be a much BETTER example of Outkast for the 2k4 than Kanye is - and I like that Big and Rich album more than SB/LB (SB was the better half, by the way).

anyone wondering about how christianity's been used to 'tame' the black man in america for over three hundred years need only glance at a couple of the hundred or so "jesus walks" hosannahs - "dont be angry / dont be fucking / just pray and pray again": ugh. i guarantee you if rove thought bushco had a real shot at the black vote or hadn't (astutely) decided "fuck the blacks, lets try to get the hispanic vote" then "jesus walks" woulda been the "born in the usa" of 1984. plus kanye's a shitty rapper.

I disagree w/ practically all of this. And your narrative of the history of black christianity that neglects to give any agency to african americans is pretty disturbing too.

One thing that contradicts my argument that could be accurate was the statement people made last year that andre's album was an introduction to hip-hop, and perhaps the fact that kanye - who, as Nate said, is "100% hip-hop" - is about to win is somehow related to andre's success. And perhaps this parallel will translate to big and rich + some other act next year. But I have a hard time believing it.

I've only been reading the blogosphere/ILM critical thing for about two years, so maybe my ability to detect critical trends lacks perspective, but I can't help but feel like there are certain "in" genres/styles/albums every year that are in vogue to the critical establishment - and while ILM/blogosphere may be the more progressive end of the critical establishment, i see the same sort of thing happening here.

Example:
Not that she has a perfect perspective or anything, but a friend of mine from school is jamaican and has a huge interest - understandably - with jamaican music, and she said that she felt dancehall had a better year this year than in 2003. Yet in the critical blogosphere, the opposite conclusion was reached. Not that she has a "more correct" view or anything - but I guess what I'm getting at is that it seems that trends and fads do sort of sweep the critical world and I felt like that was happening here. I mean, look at how Dizzee is doing this year vs. last year - respectably, but aside from enthusiasts, the pfork massive haven't (to my knowledge) exactly been shaking stores down for wiley albums or other grime singles.

http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/2004/12/robert-johnson-rockism-and-hip-hop.html

As quoted there:

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music...Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most-rural sounding styles, and set a pattern for any future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial...

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. (Ed. note: Like Rick James, bitch!) To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. (Ed. note: Like Freestyle Fellowship or Bun B, bitch!) By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues-stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

This fit nicely with the beat aesthetic, and indeed with the whole mythology of modern art. While Shakespeare had been a favorite playwright of the Elizabethan court, and Rembrandt had been portraitist to wealthy Amsterdam, the more recent idols were celebrated for their rejections: Van Gogh had barely sold a painting in his lifetime, The Rite of Spring had caused a riot, Jack Kerouac's On The Road had been turned down by a long string of publishers. Where jazz had once been regarded as a popular style, a new generation of fans applauded Miles Davis for turning his back on the audience and insisting that his music speak for itself, while deriding Louis Armstrong as a grinning Uncle Tom. On the folk-blues scene, Van Ronk and his peers regarded anything that smacked of showmanship as a betrayal of the true tradition, a lapse into the crowd-pleasing fakery of the Weavers and Josh White. As he would later recall with some amusement, "If you weren't staring into the sound-hole of your instrument, we thought you should at least have the decency and self-respect to start at your shoes."

As in John Hammond's Carnegie Hall (Ed. note: a concert called Spirituals to Swing that packaged a grand narrative of black music), art was opposed to entertainment...

...Clapton and the Stones were the first pop stars ever to insist that they were playing blues...that was the sound they loved: no horns, no string sections, no girls going "oo-wah"--just slashing guitars and wailing harmonica.

Then the English kids flew across the Atlantic, bringing the gospel home. And they did something unprecedented: Unlike the hundres of white blues singers before them...they took it upon themselves to edcated their audience. "Our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters," Keith Richards would later say. "We were carrying flags, idealistic teenage sort of shit: There's no way we think anybody is really going to seriously listen to us. As long as we can get a few people interested in listening to the shit we think they ought to listen to..."

It's probably a much bigger issue w/ dancehall bcuz most bloggers/critics aren't engaging w/ the form the way most jamaicans are - simply for practical/economic reasons.