Just this weekend I heard Kanye West referred to as a genius by two different people (one was a DJ and one was someone whose opinions I thought I respected). Some of it seems vaguely catchy (I liked “Through the Wire” years ago) but most of it seems quite bad. I spent about twenty minutes looking through lyrics and just laughing at how bad they were (“I’m Kan, the Louis Vuitton Don
Bought my mom a purse, now she Louis Vuitton Mom”–rhyming Louis Vuitton Don with Louis Vuitton Mom?!).
I read a Rolling Stone article that called his song “Drunk and Hot Girls” a “dead honest portrayal of chasing ladies.”
So what gives? Is this just a case of Kanye being so enamored of himself and everyone parroting it back? Or do most people consider this great art?
You know, up until fairly recently I was positive that Kanye West and Cornel West were the same person - a prominent black Ivy League academic with a second career as a respected rapper. I was hugely disappointed to discover my error.
Re-imagined thread title: “Kanye West: A Gigantic Douche?”
I’m not a big hip hop fan, but I have to agree that Kanye West’s self-regard is amazing and not justified by anything I’ve heard - or the sunglasses or the vodka. Gold Digger is pretty good, but even a run of songs at that level doesn’t make you a legend.
I don’t think that anyone could or would credibly call him a genius, but he was a great producer who almost singlehandedly brought the crate digger/loop chopper/sample flipper aesthetic back to mainstream top-40 hip hop after a decade and a half of keyboard beats. As his fame has increased, his production has gotten worse, because he can now afford all of the cheap shortcuts that so often hamper creativity of his type, like clearing recognizable 8-bar loops of famous songs instead of creatively flipping samples to make them pass (see; Puff Daddy). This autotuned, all-keyboard record 808’s and Heartbreaks really demonstrates how far he’s come from what made him notable.
This isn’t true. There have been numerous hits with the crate digger vibe all throughout the period you mention. If anything the synthetic, keyboard beats aesthetic is more popular now than it has ever been.
I’m talking about like '99-'03 - his beats for other people. Who else was chopping samples in that era? It was all Mannie Fresh and Neptunes, just a total keyboard beat era. People like Just Blaze were Kanye followers!
I think he’s a douchebag, but much of his music is catchy and smooth, not artificially hard-edged like so much hip-hop. I have a couple of his albums and just about every song on Graduation is good. His song Flashing Lights is in Grand Theft Auto IV, that’s what made me seek that album.
While I do like the catchiness of his songs, I wouldn’t call anyone in music a genius. A genius is someone like Norman Einstein.
I have to say that many of his rhymes are catchy. They seem sort of corny at first but they eventually make me smile, which isn’t easy. I also think that Kanye is a trendsetter in the hip-hop community by being fashion-conscious and displaying metro-sexual traits. He doesn’t allow homophobia to control how he dresses and acts. I think that he deserves credit for that, especially in the hip-hop world where being “hard” has been glorified to ridiculous levels.
This is pretty much why I enjoyed Kanye’s first three albums. They’re quite good because as cocky as he could be- he was coming from a direction that isn’t really “the norm” in terms of what was out there. His songs Jesus Walks, Diamonds (From Sierra Leon) and* Big Brother*- are all examples of songs that would be “risky” and not exactly what I’d expect of a Rapper trying to be mainstream and successful. However, for each of those songs there is a popular “pop” song- like how *Stronger *was. I like his honest songs “through the wire” and ‘big brother’, but I do like his clever word play and little twists, even if they are cocky- The line “I’m like a fly Malcolm X- Buy any Jeans Necessary” is a GREAT pun/one liner.
That’s why I certainly would give him his props, his producing in the early days is what could be considered closer to “genius” but even then, genius is an overused term that pretty much means whatever it wants to whoever wants to use it. So it doesn’t really work too well.
But I will say that I think Kanye is one of the more interesting rapper out there, because he does some interesting things (like his releasing a whole Autotune album- but then helping to produce Jay-Z’s most recent track “D.O.A- Death of Autotune”- an irony which he has noted himself).
I personally like him better as a Rapper than as the singer Kanye, but time will tell what he does.
I just don’t see how that’s all that clever. A lot of them just seem kind of dorky. Like how he was saying how he knew his record would be a hit when he wrote the line, “She got a light skinned friend look like Michael Jackson.” I mean, that’s like every other comic’s line ever.
:shrug: beats me- then again, I liked the line: “You had a boyfriend, Who looked like a girlfriend, That I had in February of last year”. YMMV, and when it comes to taste, everyone’s mileage varies.
Considering what I usually hear for Rap music is usually meh to me- it was something that stood out. That’s why I like to keep my Rap music compared to other Rap music. His music and style certainly sounded better than that which was out there at the time to my ears.
Another fun one- his parody/Cover of “Throw Some Some D’s on that Bitch”.
The original is what I tend to not really care about when I listen to rap, but his cover took it in another direction, one that I thought was amusing and clever. Obviously YMMV.
