Kanye West, Yeezus, 6/18/13 (TBC because who knows anymore)

There are so many lines in that interview I wanted to cut and paste here, but my god, it'd be less than fully fair to Kanye to post anything other than the entire thing.

why won't NYT publish the word "shit"

it's 2013

"I’ve been connected to the most culturally important albums of the past four years, the most influential artists of the past ten years. You have like, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Nicolas Ghesquière, Anna Wintour, David Stern."

Poll!

Those are some amazing answers. Great use of third-person and crazed historical comparisons.

"Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That's all it is."

Early draft of Ode on a Grecian Urn.

So when the next little girl that wants to be, you know, a musician and give up her anonymity and her voice to express her talent and bring something special to the world, a man will be there to grab the mic and say she didn't deserve that award.

― some dude, Wednesday, June 12, 2013 2:47 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hahaha this is EXACTLY what i thought

i feel like j-kwon could have been slotted into his list of great artists of the last ten years, between henry ford and walt disney.

i also want everyone to know that i hate jon caramanica.

Woild.love a pic of how Caramanica responded to each Ye line.

Still they got me like Yeezus.

I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and forward-thinking and broad-minded and in the end what he cares most about is winning more Grammys. That'd be like some self-professed great chef aspiring to get a sandwich on the McDonald's menu.

otm

hahaha

ikr!

Odub must contemplate

i like the elite gymnastics guys take on kanyes weird grammy obsession:

"when kanye attempts to make sense of the grammy awards, he refuses to settle on a position as boring as simple cynicism. he is completely aware of how out of touch and off the mark grammy voters tend to be - he sees that as a challenge. in his eternal, astonishing optimism about the power of art and creative achievement in the face of all potential obstacles he believes that in order to conquer the gordian knot of exotic wrongness that is the grammy awards, he simply needs to make something so good that even the legendarily inept grammy voters can’t deny it’s greatness."

"These McDonald's eaters WILL love my waygu beef panini dammit."

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4wobf7NRp1rxoylbo1_1280.jpg

i'm not sure that's 100% true, the interview touched on where that obsession seems to actually come from - kanye sees the grammys as a historical document. and not just the grammys - that's why he's obsessed with "changing radio" and probably with sales too - tangible markers of his achievements and success. it's this weird mixture of an extreme hip-hop mindset w/r/t awards etc, and an extreme indie mindset w/r/t the purity of ~art~, and the fact that he doesn't attempt to make them gel together is what makes him so...whatever. i'd say fascinating but it's not that fascinating. you're not sure whether he doesn't try to reconcile them because he's too dumb or coked-up to realise there's a disconnect or whether it's a very admirable #YOLO give-no-fucks thing.

also the ability to be confident in art-for-art's-sake and not need the grammys' validation at all is something of a privilege - the racial dimensions to being written out of history etc

What Kanye needs is a satellite radio station.

And a hug.

what he needs is a Grammy.

he has 21 of them!

Album of the Year, that is

if anything on this record is as good as the abbreviation"'gevity" I am all over it

― daft on the causes of punk (schlump), Wednesday, 12 June 2013 02:00 (11 hours ago) Bookmark

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

altho... it's not even an abbrev cos the way he uses it you can also have a short gevity

genius

brevity vs. 'gevity

gevity is the soul of twits

hmm idk now, is longevity a neutral term for duration or does it imply a long span

discount my 'gevity youll end up apologin'

The thing his statistical obsession reminds me most of is Michael Jackson's goal to make an album that sold 100 million copies -- it's looking for some kind of quantification of status. In Michael's case it seemed like a proxy for love, in Kanye's it's a more abstract form of respect, but either way it comes across as extreme neediness.

In the early nineties Neil Tennant, referring to the S-A-W acts who went on and on in interviews about"being about longevity," said the act of surviving in the industry for years is for artists itself a validation almost as powerful as a Grammy).

What Kanye needs is

http://www.pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/jackson-float-uk-1-310.jpg

i found 50% of that interview to be almost completely unintelligible

the grammys thing to me is that for a lot of these guys, the old systems of measurement are corrupted, so they no longer matter. they don't trust radio, don't care about singles downloads and see every successive album sell a little bit less than the last. how do you even measure success in the industry now? virtually no one is stacking multiple platinum plaques anymore. the grammys -- no matter how fusty -- have remained uncorrupted and simple. you make something dope and hopefully people vote for you to win. it's the only system of arbitration left in the music industry that hasn't been usurped by technology and recession.

the grammys -- no matter how fusty -- have remained uncorrupted and simple.

Ow my brain. (I see what you're getting at but OW MY BRAIN.)

give or take an al walser

The Grammy voters gather:

http://www.bayarea.net/~kins/AboutMe/Raphael_fresco/Raphael_SchoolOfAthens.jpg

but the typical Grammys show these days is nine tenths music. In the days of Kenny Loggins and Bonnie Raitt there was more time for bizzers to get self-righteous in front of a mic.

i.e. the Grammys look like Dancing with the Stars or The Voice

that is insane j0rdan

"the grammys -- the last simple, uncorrupted way of knowing whether a musician and their music have truly made an impact on the world"

fuck white America -- except Neil Portnow, I desperately need his approval

well there's a few reasons why artists -- even kanye -- still care about the grammys. winning awards is nice. there is a prestige factor. for rappers, especially, there's still some sort of mutinous element to winning a grammy, i think. but also i think artists see it as one of the last arbiters left that allows them to measure themselves up against their peers & predecessors. because the old ways don't really work anymore.

the-dream said this to me in an interview. it's sort of petulant but i think there's truth in it.

"I think I have the respect of my peers, and that's the only one that matters," says The-Dream. "I definitely don't carry a certain respect with social media or whatever it is, because what a person means in music doesn't mean anything today. What I'm doing means absolutely nothing to them," he says. "That's why as much as we want to speak out most of the time against the Grammys, the point actually is that those things are decided amongst our peers in music, on what's good or not."

...yay?

so it doesn't matter that Grammys ratings have gone down, that they're less central to the music industry or to what music fans think than they've ever been, that they don't even effect record sales as much anymore? somehow having a #1 song or a #1 album has lost its luster in some more profound way? idg

i think it's more that a trophy is a trophy, and they can pretend a Grammy actually means something concrete and indisputable in the same way as, i dunno, an Olympic gold medal or a Super Bowl ring, but it totally doesn't and everybody knows that.

sales are nice but pale to the raw purity of a for your consideration poster

will smith needs to have a talk with ye about patterns