Kanye West

"as long as mccartney's voice doesn't ever get involved I spose he can't fuck it up too much"

thinking this will prove wishful thinking. kanye could make the juxtaposition cool, but it's a tall order...

haha, fair point. I mean if it ends up working it ultimately won't matter, and I think it does work on this song. kanye almost always weaves the contributions of his collaborators into his own specific musical aesthetic in a way that seems organic (keef on "hold my liquor," fergie on "all of the lights," jon brion's arrangements and instrumentation all over late registration, etc.), so even bringing in paul mccartney doesn't worry me. yet.

paul vox on this, & the accompanying processing, are a neat thing i think

Omari and Ivory

so this song is probably the best vocal performance he's done so far, although the song itself is a bit corny, but then I went and read the story of how he came up with it and now I'm all choked up

probably didn't hurt that I just had my pre-dinner cocktail...

are paul's vox on this though? i think the backing vocal voice, when not doubled kanye, has been IDed as being ty dolla $ign

nah pretty sure Paul's just on keys on this

outro on this thing never fucking ends

just the idea that kanye has worked with paul mccartney makes me lol a bit. it gets better as it goes along. his vocals at the start seem quite bad. also, the 'and if you knew how proud' part comes in a bit suddenly. its just a rough demo right? it could be good but i hope this isnt on the finished album.

it seems like with the whole thing about how the song 'captured a special moment' they probably just wanted to leave it at that spare original recording. could be a good album closer, interesting first thing to release but i suppose it operates as a pretty dramatic palate cleanser after Yeezus.

it deserves hidden track status at best

rappers' songs about their kids are mostly terrible iirc

what about rappers' songs about grandmothers singing to gran kid?

this is sweet i guess but i have no real desire to hear it again

...and about a minute too long

this is sweet i guess but i have no real desire to hear it again
--lex pretend

this was basically my reaction

it seems like a decent album track, i'd never skip it but wouldn't actively seek it out

I could see it being a powerful album moment depending on sequencing, but yeah I am surprised by how minor it is.

The sentiment is so simple that it isn't served by the song length; it's a powerful two minute track drawn out to a lukewarm 5 min one

Not mad this exists but it's more of a one off single, isn't it? Maybe slap it on a deluxe edition of whatever the new album is called.

Works as a 180 from Yeezus.

that's what's so great about kanye. there really aren't that many other songwriters who present as comprehensive a portrait of themselves in their music as he does.

I don't think this makes a songwriter great...? Lots of'em present portraits of themselves. What made him for me a pleasure til 2010 was his attitude and how the beats abetted it. For electric piano tinkle and sighing, Bon Iver's around.

still soty

I mean, everyone has their own criteria. I like kanye for the compositional boldness of his music (this song is 't so bold though) but I also like his unflinching confessionalism. He is willing to be both embarrassingly hateful and embarrassingly corny and sentimental, and you never get a sense that he is disavowing any one of these moods as aspects of a persona or mask a la eminem. A kind of artlessness pulled off artfully

i don't see how he's unique in that

There does seem to be a lack of Kanye filter as of late, pretty inchoate in his targets and anger and vitriol. This side of him really seemed to pop up after his mom died, so I wonder if she had a significant tempering effect on the guy. Listening to "The College Dropout" and then his most recent stuff, back to back, it sounds almost like someone took this nice guy who liked to smile and locked him in a room for a decade, forcing him to raise and then kill a puppy a week.

it's almost like fame turns people into assholes. who knew

there's absolutely no pre-fame Kanye interview or anecdote that gives any indication that he was less of an asshole before he was famous though haha

Keyboard outro is very McCartney II.

Idk if he is an asshole though. He seems like a sensitive guy who somehow got the (mistaken?) impression that it's virtuous to have no filter.

not virtuous so much as ~artistic

i don't think he's an asshole either, or at least any more of an asshole than any given famous pop star, which is why making it the focal point of his artistic persona feels uninteresting & reductive

that's well put lex

In this clip, Kanye is being silly and smiling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylT16QB6Uig

With Anna Nicole Smith, the ur Kardashian.

lol "The New Workout Plan" probably prompted the closest thing to a backlash he got for any record before 808s

just the memory of that video is o_O

Ooh girl your breath is harsh!
Cover your mouth up like you got SARS

silly and smiling

I've always maintained that Big Sean's whole rap style is jacked from Farnsworth Bentley in that video.

i like this song but the sparse keybs totally remind me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hSK8GmGooM

bentley's verse on that song is secretly kinda fire

is there a fonzworth bentley biography?

Forrest Gump

this was pretty cool iirc

http://www.livemixtapes.com/mixtapes/13748/fonzworth_bentley_colours.html

Oh yeah COLOURS the song was the shit, great Pimp C verse and Weezy in that 2006-2007 stretch where he killed everything. Prob for the best that Ye stayed off that one.

oh shit, tracee ellis ross is Fifi LeBeouff in that Workout Plan video; must've blocked that

Workout Plan to me always sounded like Kanye West trying to make an Eminem song.

Or was that a pretty common criticism of the song at that time?

Now that you mention it the "it's been a week without me" chorus does sound a lot like Slim.

holy cow that sounds like a (post-greatness) eminem song. actually sounds like D12 more than anything. awful

College Dropout: the gift that keeps on giving