Kanye West

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

"My Band" >>>> "The New Workout Plan" (i like them both tho)

Anyway I wrote a thing. Not really about the song.

http://thequietus.com/articles/16966-kanye-west-paul-mccartney

https://vine.co/v/OdPTlYV0WYY

Anyway I wrote a thing. Not really about the song.

http://thequietus.com/articles/16966-kanye-west-paul-mccartney

― Ned Raggett

In short:
https://twitter.com/AesopDekker/status/552169207731724288

Who are the people making these claims? Was there a printed piece about it? Tweets?

Posts like this.

Shades of Grammy night "Who is Arcade Fire," except broadened to include every doofus on twitter, which probably skews young (and doofus), anyway.

No, I was asking who are the people making the claims that those who don't know who PM is are ignorant.

lol Workout Plan was the song/video that sold me on Kanye tbh. was it really so bad and hated?

I think the song is funny. It was my wife's fave from the album, iirc.

Now that it's mentioned, it is really Eminem-esque, isn't it?

maura had good words on the whole thing http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television/2015/01/06/kanye-west-paul-mccartney-and-ever-present-past/uHT46Dh1lpDxfaYk4y7GUP/story.html

yeah that piece is v good

2015 and autotune still sounds like shit.

^

http://oculos.blog.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/t-pain-carrera-safari.gif

I was just under the impression that a lot of the Twitter comments were jokes because I have a hard time believing that there are people out there who listened to that track and thought "Man, that guy playing the piano in the background of this song is going to blow up huge. I'm going to go on Twitter to find out who he is, instead of Googling it". It just doesn't feel like the type of song where his contributions stand out enough to warrant a comment like that sincerely. And do people usually make comments about that for people that are actually unknown? I don't pay enough attention to social media to know if people thought Mr Hudson was going to blow up huge circa 808s and Heartbreaks.

lol i'd wager that most of them were jokes. some were actual young person dumbness im sure, and well, who cares about that. the indignance stemmed from ppl either not getting the jokes or being offended that filthy rap loving millennials were daring to joke about his OBE twatness macca

I def had that feeling Kanye was going to blow up huge after 808s and Heartbreaks.

And do people usually make comments about that for people that are actually unknown?

i mean...sometimes? i remember sorta thinking that when lupe fiasco showed up on touch the sky, back when he was fun