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

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100% true, the interview touched on where that obsession seems to actually come from - kanye sees the grammys as a historical document.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

look, i'm not saying that artists SHUOLD care about the grammys. but they do! even tho kanye says he doesn't, obviously he does. i think to artists -- especially in black pop, which has been hit harder in the collapse of the industry than white pop -- it's still seen as a more pure measurement of artistic credibility than, yes, charts/sales. kanye can't beat macklemore on the charts, but he just won two grammys.

lol macklemore's gonna win a gang of grammys next year isn't he

kanye can't beat macklemore on the charts, but he just won two grammys.

so what you're saying is kanye is old now

I'm predicting most of next year's Grammy's to go to either Justin Timberlake or Daft Punk.

i think to artists -- especially in black pop, which has been hit harder in the collapse of the industry than white pop -- it's still seen as a more pure measurement of artistic credibility than, yes, charts/sales.

Trying to take this at face value, and acknowledging that we've got two anecdotes via Kanye and The-Dream along these lines, this is still kinda hard to believe. I realize the Grammy voters en masse in 2013 aren't the same ones that, say, gave Jethro Tull the metal Grammy and all, but...

The first award for Best Rap Performance was first presented to DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (the vocal duo consisting of DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith) for "Parents Just Don't Understand".The ceremony was not without controversy; nominees Jeff and Smith led a boycott in protest of the award presentation not being televised, and some members of the rap community felt that more qualified artists were overlooked. After the 1990 ceremony, where Young MC won the award, the category was split into Best Rap Solo Performance and Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group.

These two categories were once again combined from 2012, as a result of a restructure of Grammy categories. It was the consequence of the Recording Academy's wish to decrease the list of categories and awards and to eliminate the distinctions between solo and duo or group performances.

1989: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
1990: Young MC
2012: Jay-Z & Kanye West
2013: Jay-Z & Kanye West

Meanwhile I posted Josh's McDonald's bit over on Tumblr and that's caused a bit of discussion:

marathonpacks:

It’s tacky to “us,” but I think it makes perfect sense if you consider that Kanye considers himself a “professional creative” more than he considers himself an “artist,” and says as much in the interview. He namedrops Gil Scott Heron and Dead Prez, but via that interview, he’s thinking of his process and cultural positionality more in the lineage of designers and “image people,” aka the advertising, design, and branding worlds. Those people think of themselves as artists, too, only their work has a functionality and foregrounding of style that they can easily reconcile with the more romantic, “outsider” perspective we ascribe to transcendent artists. They also love rewarding each other for their brilliance in creating art-with-a-function. There’s nothing tacky about seeking the highest award your chosen industry has on offer if you choose this perspective, which Kanye clearly has. I bet he’d love to get a Clio for his pre-release projection stunts.

(also, I love how he puts David Stern in his Mount Rushmore of legends including Anna Wintour and Walt Disney. Honestly, I really love it.)

--

tomewing:

To the extent that the ‘function’ disappears. There are ad awards which are specifically ABOUT “effectiveness” (how well an ad drives sales) in which effectiveness is actually a mighty 33% of the judging criteria.

Sorry, work head on here. Kanye is pretty good at marketing, yes, and pre-release campaigns are the new music videos (or something), though how many of them make a success of records which wouldn’t have been highly anticipated anyhow?

so is Kanye an institutionalist or an insurrectionist?

is he eternal? or an eternalist?

is kanye possible?

Human, dancer

"jackass" aspect aside, i find it pretty hard to begrudge kanye's contradictory impulses re institutions like the grammys and don't feel he has any responsibility to resolve them