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

new slaves is more compelling after repeat listens. i think i might have changed my opinion from what i said upthread -- i forget what i've said -- with regard to kanye's "hypocritical" condemnation of consumerism and his hypermaterialistic lifestyle. i don't have as many cool jackets as kanye, but i relate to it. capitalism makes hypocrites of us, all and it is a real conflict to want to succeed within a system you disapprove of.

it is an old theme for kanye though. might be wearing thin...

croissants makes gluttons of us all

everything that axl roses must converge

the other day i stumbled upon that 80 billion tweet rant he did last year announcing DONDA, and in it he mentioned that he hadn't bought a car or any jewelry in 2 years at that point. obviously has bought lots of expensive clothes since then but considers that more of an artistic pursuit than copping a chain or w/e i guess. in any even that slightly tempered my view of the whole "it's hypocritical of him to hate on conspicuous consumerism in songs" angle.

eh he still rides around nyc in a maybach

exactly, it's been so long since he bought a car that he's literally driving a model that is no longer in production

anyway i feel like music -- esp popular music -- doesn't need to be rigidly coherent. in something like "new slaves" you can pretty easily glean his POV. even something as simple as "i know that we the new slaves" is pretty powerful. and, like, who can really in 2013 level the realities of how we live with a belief system. it's sorta the same arguments people made against occupy wall street: how can you protest WHILE HAVING AN IPHONE??? i guess maybe you could say kanye has more leeway in his life to slant things further towards his belief system because he's a celebrity but i could certainly see it being the opposite.

the guy is a great sloganeer, and certainly this album is pretty blaring evidence of that even if it also bleeds into something like croissant line.

croissant line is dope tbh

i understand people who feel like the lyrics here are halfassed and even a lil insulting in how little they think is required of them to be considered trenchant political commentary, but this "hypocrisy" thing: who'd you think he was so angry at? similarly i totally feel the exasperated eyeroll tone of the guy in the video upthread but the moment he should have stopped for a second and gone like huh! was right after he said "you're telling me you chose to be a slave?"

to an extent i feel kanye's "problem" is the same as m.i.a.'s for me. i think they're both fundamentally talented musicians capable of making a lot of dope music and their artistic directions continue to interest me - i mean, compare them to snoop dogg, whom i love a lot more uncomplicatedly but have i bothered to listen to his new reggae album? i have not. BUTTTT i always feel kanye and m.i.a. are almost challenging me to buy into them wholesale but so much of what they do means i'm totally unable to take them seriously, so there's a distance there - i can admire them and be amused by them but i can't, like, bow down before their greatness and importance like i can with idk beyoncé or t-swift. i don't think "oooh look at my incoherent contradictions aren't they fascinating" merits that. m8 i know all about the inherent contradictions of being alive and human in 2013 and i'm a decade younger than you.

(also yeah, KANYE IS THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD. that's too old for a lot of this.)

Ha ha. otm

36, but yeah

but 38 is the new 12

Long, long interview that the quote on HuffPost above was taken from:

http://www.wmagazine.com/people/celebrities/2013/06/kanye-west-on-kim-kardashian-and-his-new-album-yeezus/

without all these articles, where kanye is described eating microwaved chinese food off hermes plates and reading swiss "obscure body-art journals" and just listening to it without that, if it was possible-- lyrically, based on his allusions and interests, you wouldn't imagine he was living this monocle spread lifestyle.

yeah you're comment that he could've just stayed in chicago to make this record was kinda true. it also doesn't sound like it needed 30 producers or whatever. which i'm not mad at, i don't really care if there's a bunch of unnecessary expense or effort that you can't actually hear, i just think it's funny.

http://hypetrak.com/2013/06/the-making-of-yeezus-with-kanye-wests-team/

well, let's link the actual thing instead of a shady-ass "extensive excerpt" someone put their own byline on top of: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9157-the-yeezus-sessions/

i think you can definitely hear the other producers at work

sure, but if you'd told me it was 3 guys and not the dozens they had i wouldn't be the wiser.

irrespective of the lyrical content / sample used, i love the use of tnght on blood on the leaves

Kanye approached the influences on the album as he approaches everything, with the omnivorous intent of a young T.S. Eliot. Kanye quite resembled Eliot's "Jew underneath the lot" the night he heard his first blast of the sound of Europe's cutting edge at a Chanel prêt-à-porter show in 2012-- Kanye truly was "money in furs." As the models filed offstage, including Bhutanese model and Kanye confidante Jigme Drul, Karl Lagerfeld took the stage to the throbbing beat of Paris' most exclusive discothèques. If most hip-hoppers would feel most comfortable courtside at a Miami Heat basketball game, Kanye looked right at home in his Yves St. Laurent fur vest, a personal gift from YSL's helmsman Stefano Pilati. After an unreciprocated wave to Lagerfeld (the slight, which left Kanye fuming, is addressed on the track "Hold My Liquor" on his new album), Kanye reached into his matte black alligator Hermes bag and withdrew his iPhone 5, a personal gift from the late Steve Jobs' personal assistant. Kanye used the Shazam app to identify the producers of the track and immediately placed a phone call to an unnamed Paris music insider. Within a week, cult electrop duo Daft Punk were hashing out the first tracks of Yeezus, comfortably ensconsed in Pierre Jeanneret in his 19th century apartment, which was once home to French screen legend Audrey Tatou (Kanye cites Tatou's classic 2001 film, Amelie, as one of his reasons for coming to the famed City of Lights).

So much to take from that paragraph

Damn, I fell for another parody didn't I?

can only hope

I really want dylannn to keep writing these.

that was incredible

x2

<3 <3 <3 <3 !!!!!!!!!!

so good

we shd poll dk parody posts

Meanwhile, from the man himself

http://gawker.com/i-will-die-for-what-s-in-my-heart-kanye-west-in-his-562700648

Hey, I just looked down and realized how dope my shirt is.

totally lost it here

I hope I am never famous enough that Gawker does that to me.

^ this sentence pops into my head so often it's become like a mantra

"If I heard Graduation and it was made by somebody else, I would go to the bathroom and take a shit, because I would be scared. This record speaks to me so much."

interesting how Rubin's roll in this album seems to have been mostly as editor

role*

didnt know evian christ worked on this

interesting how Rubin's roll in this album seems to have been mostly as editor

teo macero-esque

who was better at taking naps, Rick Rubin or Teo Macero

ha, I said that before I saw this

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/06/26/rick-rubin-on-crashing-kanye-s-album-in-15-days.html

A buddy and I were predicting how we think Jay-Z will eventually die. And we came to the conclusion that he'll go in a way associated with European royalty: he was skiing in Switzerland, went too close to the traffic while riding his bicycle in France, or dies while in Germany.

Kanye, though, will perish by touching the Ark of the Covenant, the discovery of which he'll personally finance and heavily publicize in 2020+

We agreed that Kanye will probably die from one of the many kinds of vaguely sci-fi-ish deaths people thought would do-in Michael Jackson from the mid-80s onwards.

Too bad Johnny Cash didn't live long enough to cover "New Slaves."

oh, if Cash was alive today he'd have enough rap covers for a Love, God, Murder And Molly box set

amazing: http://thetalkhouse.com/reviews/view/lou-reed

this is for real the best piece of music writing i have read in forever - lou's kinda goosebumpin-at-ornette sincerity is always really inspirational & his throw-aways here are really amusing (cf taylor swift). what an awesome piece.

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