I have no robust opinions, views or thoughts on Kanye; apart from Gold Digger - which will stay with me forever:
Back in 2015, our (then) first, newborn daughter was having a troubled first few weeks of life - which meant that we, the parents, were having a rough time of it, too. The whole thing was incredibly fraught and emotional for all involved. We had a playlist of music going 24-7 in the background of our home to keep us as sane and awake as could be reasonably expected. This wasn’t a curated playlist; mind you, it was an algorithm that had been allowed to roam free without intervention for hundreds of hours - it had gone all the way from Beethoven to drum 'n bass and back again many times.
One day, at about 3 in the morning, while my wife lay unconscious and partially upside-down on the sofa, and I was cradling our un-pacifiable raging infant child, an angelic Kanye-esque voice from the heavens descended - via the Bluetooth speaker - decreeing to all that [he] ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger, but she ain’t messin’ with no broke… and so it was that for the first time in her life my daughter actually properly went to sleep. It was as if the whole time since birth she had been waiting for Kanye to tell her “If you ain’t no chump, holla we want pre-nup - we want pre-nup, yeah!” as some kind of magical rite-of-passage.
This wasn’t a fluke or a one-off: we very quickly learnt that there was something about Gold Digger which she found to be uniquely pacifying, and for the foreseeable we had it on our phones on speed-dial. Whenever she was kicking off, we’d play Gold Digger, and usually by the time we got to “got a baby by Busta” she’d be back to sleep again.
(And yes, I tried the original Ray Charles version of the song - didn’t work)
This carried on for several months, such that my wife and I learnt not only the words to Gold Digger (which we memorised in no time at all), but also improvised a kind of ‘rock the baby to sleep’ dance routine to accompany it. Bear in mind, also, that we were singing and dancing along to the uncensored version of the song - our infant daughter was unwittingly exposed to more racist and misogynistic language in her first few weeks of life than many people are ever.
Said daughter is now 7 years old, so I can’t be playing back the song to her now as if it were some kind of cute lullaby (she is old enough to understand and quote back some of the lyrics - dangerous). Maybe, one day, when she’s a proper grown-up, this will be a fun conversation to have over a single-malt…
So whatever else you might say about Kanye, I feel like I owe him something…
