I got turned on to this by a hip hop friend and found it on my iPhone. Started with Season 2 which is focused on Kanye West’s critically-acclaimed masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
I have never listened to Kanye, even when he was up and coming and thought of only as a new type of hip hop genius, not as an immature idiot who we tolerate because he really knows his music craft.
This podcast is brilliant. The guy behind it, Cole Cuchna, is trained as a composer so knows music theory, and clearly he knows overall music history as well has hip hop history. He brings all of this to the podcast - he spends the first few episodes explaining Kanye’s rise, what made his music different and how he was dealing with fame. That gets to the point where he can frame how MBDTF was positioned as Kanye’s attempt at musical redemption and how it succeeded.
Cuchna’s delivery is even and scholarly and very engaging - he plays a bit, discusses why the chords are effective, what sample Kanye used and what was done to it, how all of that fits in how hip hop production has evolved, etc. You may know nothing about hip hop or Kanye, but if you are interested in music, I believe you would find it very engaging and informative. He has one quirk where he mispronounces some words, which stands out given his scholarly delivery. For instance, he pronounces “oscillates” as “oskalates”. I’ll live with it.
I will be going back to S1, on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly as soon as I am done with S2. Can’t recommend this highly enough.
Indeed. He’s got a lot of great work out there. Also worth checking out are College Dropout and Late Registration, his first two albums, of course. And Yeezus. Dude’s nuts, but he’s got talent.
I’ll be interested in hearing this podcast, as I’ve never heard an album dissection of any of his work, and I’ll be curious to see what I’ve missed.
Yep - I chose to listen because of a strong recommendation, but mostly because so many people I respect love Kanye’s work and MBDTF in particular, but I felt I had no way in. This is a great way in, and it covers the first 4 albums in a high-level way so you get a sense of Kanye’s music and success leading up to MBDTF.
I suspect that if you know the work, you will really enjoy hearing it put in context and broken down.
Graduation is great too and 808s (while I find it unlistenable) is largely responsible for most of modern hip hop (think Drake being a singer instead of just a rapper).
I have a half hour to kill I’ll listen to the first episode now.
Yeah, this fella Cole Cuchna does a great job pulling on musical, music history, hip hop, pop culture and other fields and weaving them in, in service to the greater narrative, in this case, the story of Kanye West and/or the specific meaning of a song on an album. Really engaging.
I know, right? His breakdown of Monster was really good, and his structuring of his analysis of the album into three sections - Beautiful, Dark, and Twisted - seems to really work.
Right. I love that he does stuff like go into the history of Posse Tracks when talking about So Appalled. It’s really well thought out.
A totally different thing that this reminds me of is a YouTube Documentary series called Nick Knacks about the history of Nickelodeon. That guy does a similar thing going TV series by TV series in chronological order but also giving a whole history of Cable TV at the same time.
I haven’t heard the Dissect podcast yet (look forward to it). Just wanted to mention a book series any of you would surely enjoy: 33 1/3. It’s over a hundred small but potent volumes, written since around 2002, each by a devoted fan (sometimes with some sort of relevant “expertise,” but not academic per se), in which some album is similarly dissected, usually both track-by-track and the “making of” the album
Since the series started, quite good “making of” histories are now available on Wikipedia and the like, so the value of the series is more in the track-by-track analyses — especially when infused with a strong personal approach, such as the one for A Tribe Called Quest’s first album.
I read about 10 of those 33 1/3 book. So hit or miss. I recall loving the one on MBVs Loveless, but finding the one on Prince’s Sign o’ the Times truly awful.
This guy on Dissect is much better than most of those. Sorry, JKelly, not looking to be a party pooper. I would love to find more examples that are as goood as this. I have to believe someone has done this for Dylan.
You’re not a party pooper — just sounds like you happen to have picked some duds from the book series. That’s the subject for another thread — let’s just say I’ve only been disappointed by two of the nine I’ve read.
Ian MacDonald, of course, set the bar high for track-by-track observations, in his book Revolution in the Head. That’s what I’ll be comparing the podcast to, not so much to the 33 1/3 books.
Finally at the end of EP14 the guy learns how to pronounce oscillate!
Excellent podcast BTW. I knew nothing of Kanye, or this album, or modern hip hop at all to be honest. But I’ve really come to appreciate this album over the last couple days. Looking forward to actually listening to it in its entirety straight through afterwards (which I haven’t done yet).
I am up to ep10 and still loving it. When my daughter was down in the kitchen, she didn’t want to hear the podcast, so I just put on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and listened to most of it. When we got to Nicki Minaj in Monster, my daughter lip-sync’d her something fierce. Hilarious.
I have to say, as a person outside hip hop and without the ability to pick apart rap lyrics via repeated listening and looking up the lyrics online, getting this detailed download makes listening to the songs so much easier for me. I can both just enjoy the flow, but also hear the words, wordplay, and meanings. I find so much rap impenetrable because I don’t have the energy to invest.
My favorite bit of trivia so far is that Runaway was written in 4 minutes as a freestyle. That’s genuinely jaw dropping.
I am mildly disappointed that he seems to have missed the obvious allegory of Devil in a New Dress, which is also actually about Yeeze and the Hip Hop industry and only superficially about a girl (like pretty much the whole album).
I was just on a train and listened to another one. What about Ep12, Runaway Part 2? Cole the Podcaster goes off on an extended scholarly riff - over the outro for the song Runaway - about philosophy, how it applies to this song and how music affects our lives and enables us to achieve transcendence. A complete music geek orgasm. Hilarious to contemplate, fascinating to listen to, and with a beat.
