Ah, good point.
Dang, I’m sure a city in Bostwana has lots to do with a Black American kid.
BTW honey I’m half African , and lived on the damn continent, and I’m getting seriously angry with Black Americans making up African sounding names as if they were designing an African character for Star Trek, why not wear a big board with “illiterate And pretentious” on your back, it would make things clearer.
The point is that she didn’t make it up.
And shit, we don’t know if she named him for the city in Botswana or the Hawaiian word. Hawaii is part of America, dontchaknow? Our black President is even from there!
I don’t care about where the music comes from, I just need it to sound good. As long as no one can else can do what Kanye does using samples, then I’m willing to give him credit for the work.
And I considered the fact that Kanye uses samples when I wrote the OP. I decided to use the word “make” instead of “play.” I thought that would cover it, but apparently what Kanye is doing is “re-arranging” music. Who gives a fuck? It has nothing to do with how the album sounds.
Those “severals” clearly have no clue what they’re talking about. As multimediac17 notes, people have been talking about Kanye at least as long ago as the release of The Blueprint. The releases of College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation were all huge music events. He’s collaborated with countless other artists and spawned numerous imitators. Anybody who thinks that this is going to be followed by him simply vanishing in five years frankly has no idea what he is talking about.
Kanye is up there with the hip-hop giants, and we’re going to be talking about his music for a long, long time.
I’m not even touching the comments about his name, as they are more properly the subject of a Pit thread.
I will also say that I don’t find Snoboarder Bo’s comments compelling. That’s really outside the scope of this thread, though.
Can we go back to talking about the album? I’ve been listening to “Lost in the World” a lot the last couple days. Kanye is able to make Justin Vernon’s auto-tune shtick work way better than Vernon himself did on the Blood Bank EP, and he turns it into something really fun in the process, avoiding what could easily have turned into an 808s and Heartbreak plodding mess.
It has a lot to do with how the album sounds, since Kanye can’t make up those musical bits by himself. If there weren’t real musicians somewhere making music, Kanye would be reduced to nothing but his marketing campaign and a lot of whining about how unfair everything is.
I never said you had to give a fuck, but you should at least acknowledge that the man couldn’t do what he does, at all, without other very talented people who spent years learning how to properly play instruments, understand music theory, write songs, etc.
As I mentioned, in all his albums, the guy’s only ever even written 9 songs by himself, even with the use of samples and drum machines. 9 songs out of at least 82, and none at all by himself since 2005. That’s hardly the output of a songwriting genius, IMO.
I’m just saying, at least be knowledgable and honest about what the guy does: he re-arranges the good bits from other people’s efforts, with lots of help from collaborators, and then markets them as his own work. And yeah, in that, he’s been very successful, at least financially. Like, I said, he’s more about marketing than he is about music, IMO.
Collaborations are extremely, extremely common in rap and I don’t think you should hold them against the primary artist. Almost every song on Big Boi’s (excellent) album has them. Lil’ Wayne’s acclaimed *Tha Carter III *had them on almost every track. They are a core element of modern hip-hop and, in my opinion, really liven up most of the tracks they’re used on.
“Monster” is the best example of this I’ve heard in ages. Jay-Z’s verse is fantastic. And, as multimediac17 said, Nicki Minaj’s verse “is fucking ridiculous” – it might be the best part of the whole album. I mean, she switches between three different personalities the way you or I would switch between TV channels. (As for Pink Friday, I was kind of shocked by how, well, girly it is. I’ll give it another listen when I’m not so influenced by expectations.)
“All of the Lights” and “Runaway” are the highlights for me though. And, actually, Kanye’s verses on “Lights” are my favorite part of that song. I think “Runaway” might just be his best track since “Through the Wire,” though. Not coincidentally, both are tracks where Kanye largely shelves his massive ego and gets a bit introspective.
I love this album, and it’s inspired me to catch up on some other hip-hop albums from the past year. I’m making my way through Big Boi’s now and I’m really impressed – and I can’t get the beat from Shutterbugg out of my head.
I just have to point out that Kanye would not be reduced to nothing without samples - he does a lot of his instrumental work without them. He’s not bloody Girl Talk.
Anyway, I don’t care who originally made the sounds, I care about what they sound like now, whether they sound good and whether they make me feel something. If a song that Kanye produced - regardless of where his beats came from - sounds as good as most of his stuff does, then he’s a musical genius in my eyes because he made those decisions and, if he’s using samples, constructed something new and amazing out of something completely different.
You’re just twisting words now. Yes, where the music comes from does have something to do with how the album will sound like. I was talking about how the creation of the album has nothing to do with whether it sounds appealing to me, not what it literally sounds like.
Whatever he does, he does really well. It’s not fair to say he’s nothing more than marketing. I’ve been listening to his album non-stop for about three days now since I got it. Why? Because of Kanye’s marketing campaign? All the critics, including Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media, all love the album because of its marketing campaign?
I agree with this. Complaining that a lot of modern hip hop tracks are collaborations is like arguing that Rolling Stones songs are of less worth when more than one member of the band worked on them.
More broadly, I can’t get behind these arbitrary rules (Don’t sample too much, don’t work with other people to much) of how music should be made if we are to give credit to the artist. Kanye takes samples and turns them into something that sounds completely different from the original, he’s a good rapper, and he often works with artists who are even better rappers. As long as he keeps turning out incredible albums, I’m fine with that, and to say that his input doesn’t “really” count because of the sampling or the collaboration is extremely unpersuasive to me.
To this point, it’s worth nothing something:
I am a HUGE Michael Jackson fan- probably biggest in the world, starting in utero :p. It wasn’t until a few months ago, when I stumbled on it on Wikipedia, that I realized that Kanye’s song “Good Life” (which I had heard about 100000 times, since it was so popular for a while there) sampled “P.Y.T.” I had NO idea. None. Now I can hear it if I’m looking for it, but I’d have gotten my ass kicked at trivia if the question had been, “What song does ‘Good Life’ by Kanye West sample?”
Good Life video– the sample is the synthing sounding thing in the background, which I thought was just a . … synthy noise. In PYT, it’s actual words being said (I think it’s, “Anywhere you wanna go”), but Kanye chopped it up in a way that makes it basically unrecognizable to me.
If you’re interested, there’s a pretty cool database of who sampled whom at this website:
I think what Bo is trying to say is that, musically, what he does isn’t really that hard to do well - and I agree with him. Any bedroom producer with a nice sample library can do the same thing pretty easily.
I’m with you on this one, Bo.
Just like when someone else said in another rap thread that rapping is easy and any ol moron with a microphone could do it, I’ll say this to you:
If it’s so easy, I’m sure all of us would love to hear you whip something up for us. There are oodles of music editing programs that will aid you in this for free (Audacity is a favorite). I am really looking forward to what you come up with!
Any group of guys with a guitar, a bass and some drums can play rock songs - does that mean the Beatles don’t deserve any credit for what they created?
It absolutely means that.
throws complete collection of Beatles CDs in the bin
No big deal. As the 15 threads in CS indicated, you can just buy them on iTunes now anyway.
I took time to listen and this got me laughing real hard:
You’re my war, you’re my truce
…
You’re my stress, you’re my masseuse
Color me snobish but J.C. Almighty is there a word in hip-hop for kitchy?
I mean you CANNOT BE SERIOUS that this is the sign of “genius”?
Gawd… rarely do I feel :o fo someone else 
Carry on!
I wasn’t talking about the rapping, I was talking about the music behind it.
I firmly with you on rapping - it’s not easy to come up with creative rhymes - I’ve tried many times and failed. That is a talent that takes practice and I’m not questioning that. But even in that arena, Kanye is nothing amazing. Snoop, Jay Z, or Chuck D he is not…
But putting together a bunch of samples into a backing musical bed is easy as pie. I’ve done it many times in my project studio and I’ll do it for you, too, if you pay me as much as you pay Kanye to do it…