Music Kanye West

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Well that was disappointing, thought the album was going to be great after he played the first song, then it deteriorated.

I like Kanye's music but god is he insufferable to listen to, one of the most priviledged people in the world at this point and he justs moans and moans
 

sullydnl

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How are ye judging the album based on one live listen? Yikes.
 

Henrik Larsson

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New album coming up? Man I remember when The College Dropout came out, couldn't get enough of that. And then Late Registration made me like his music so much I actually agreed to go to a concert of his once, while normally I tend to refuse to go to mainstream concerts in big arena's with bunches of teenagers. I think that concert was in 2008, how time flies.

Very much agree with the people saying MBDTF is perfection, it really was something special. I think I listened to that two weeks straight. Not sure what happened after that, I recall checking out Yeezus one time and not liking it at all, never tried it for a second time. Watch The Throne was acceptable though. Really haven't kept up with him the over the last couple of years though, aside from the occasional headline.

Hopefully he will have his mojo back.
 

SteveJ

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sullydnl said:
Probably the most critically adored artist of the last 15 years
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Rooney1987 said:
He defiantly is one of the most talked about over last 15 years.
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The two go hand-in-hand, IMO - he provides such 'good copy' that he's the Mourinho of music for the press, regardless of actual public interest or its lack. Same as his wife's family: their show's ratings are awful; much of the public can't stand them; but they're easy & reliable fodder for newspapers, mags and websites, so they're in our faces 24/7. All this is the illusion of talent and popularity rather than the reality. Kanye's marriage is designed for mutual publicity and is known to be contractual in other ways beyond the usual pre-up agreements and so on.
 

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sullydnl said:
Probably the most critically adored artist of the last 15 years. These three albums alone...

College Dropout:

"The College Dropout was voted as the best album of the year by Rolling Stone and in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics. Spin ranked it number one on its list of 40 Best Albums of the Year. In 2005, Pitchfork Media named it #50 in their best albums of 2000–2004. In 2006, the album was named by Time as one of the 100 best albums of all time. In its retrospective 2007 issue, XXL awarded it a perfect "XXL" rating, which had previously been given to only sixteen other albums. In its July 4, 2008 issue, Entertainment Weekly listed College Dropout as the fourth best album of the past 25 years. The magazine later listed it as the best album of the decade. Newsweek placed The College Dropout among its Best Albums of the Decade list at number 3. Rhapsody named it the seventh best album of the decade and the fourth best hip hop album of the decade. Rolling Stone ranked it number 10 on its list of the 100 Best Albums of the Decade and stated, "Kanye expanded the musical and emotional language of hip-hop ... he challenged all the rules, dancing across boundaries others were too afraid to even acknowledge". In 2012 Complex named the album one of the classic albums of the last decade, and the 20th best hip hop debut album ever. The same year Rolling Stone ranked The College Dropout number 298 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and 19th on their list of debut records."

808's & Heartbreak:

"Although West designed it as a melancholic pop album, 808s & Heartbreak had a significant effect on hip hop music. While his decision to sing about love, loneliness, and heartache for the entirety of the album was at first heavily criticized by music audiences and the album predicted to be a flop, its subsequent critical acclaim and commercial success encouraged other mainstream rappers to take greater creative risks with their music. During the release of The Blueprint 3, New York rap mogul Jay-Z revealed that his next studio album would be an experimental effort, stating, "... it's not gonna be a #1 album. That's where I'm at right now. I wanna make the most experimental album I ever made." Jay-Z elaborated that like West, he was unsatisfied with contemporary hip hop, was being inspired by indie-rockers like Grizzly Bear and asserted his belief that the indie rock movement would play an important role in the continued evolution of hip hop. The album impacted hip hop stylistically and laid the groundwork for a new wave of hip hop artists who generally eschewed typical rap braggadocio for intimate subject matter and introspection, including B.o.B, Kid Cudi, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, and Drake. Jake Paine of HipHopDX dubbed the album as "our Chronic", noting West's effect on hip hop with 808s & Heartbreak as "a sound, no different than the way Dr. Dre's synthesizer challenged the boom-bap of the early '90s." Rolling Stone journalist Matthew Trammell asserted that the record was ahead of its time and wrote in a 2012 article, "Now that popular music has finally caught up to it, 808s & Heartbreak has revealed itself to be Kanye’s most vulnerable work, and perhaps his most brilliant." Music writer Greg Kot views that the album "set off" the "wave of inward-looking sensitivity" and "emo"-inspired rappers during the late 2000s, writing that it "presaged everything from the introspective hip-hop of Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon: The End of Day (2009) to the wispy crooning, plush keyboards and light mechanical beats of Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and British dub-step balladeer James Blake." According to Consequence of Sound editors Chris Bosman and Dcaff, the album still sounds fresh because of how "indie R&B or electropop or whatever you want to call it" later developed: "808s' is flooded with R&B and it digitizes the raw emotion and isolated feelings that [James Blake and The Weeknd] have carved their brands out of today." Craig D. Linsey of The Village Voice writes that the album's "naked humanity ... practically set off the emo-rap/r&b boom that everyone from Drake to Frank Ocean to The Weeknd now traffic in." Marcus Scott of GIANT writes that rappers such as B.o.B, Drake, and Kid Cudi followed West's album with similarly-minded works, with Scott noting West's introspective, emotional themes and his synthpop and "Vangelis-inspired" music as influences. Drake's 2009 mixtape So Far Gone received comparisons from music critics to 808s & Heartbreak. Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times cited 808s & Heartbreak as "the template [...] for essentially the entirety of Drake's young career", and that wrote that he "shares West's love for mood and never-ending existential analysis". In a 2009 interview, Drake cited West as "the most influential person" in shaping his own sound. In 2014, Rolling Stone included it in their list of the 40 Most Groundbreaking Albums of All Time."

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy:

"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy appeared on numerous music critics' and publications' end-of-year albums lists. Chicago Tribune writer Greg Kot included it at number seven on his list of the year's top albums, writing that it "turns contradictions into strengths, a mix of classical opulence, grimy beats, boldness and vulnerability". PopMatters named it the year's fourth best album in its year-end list, calling it "Kanye West’s self-portrait, in Cubism: complex, petulant, somewhat paranoid, but bursting with ideas and never boring". The Guardian included it at number two on its list of 2010's top 40 albums and commented that West "remains, on record, one of the most compelling artists of our time". Many critics and publications named it the best album of the year, including Billboard, Time, Slant Magazine, Pitchfork Media, Rolling Stone, and Spin. The magazine's Charles Aaron wrote that it "is 2010's album of the year because Kanye dramatizes ... with a budget-averse musical imagination that's ominous, symphonic, heartsick, riff-ravaged, and driven by the most technically legit rapping he's ever managed". The A.V. Club ranked the album at the top of its year-end list and commented on its significance, stating "Fantasy is an idiot-savant smash, an example of a musician overreaching, yet triumphing through dumb bravado and an imagination gloriously unfettered by logic. Kanye actually set out to make the album of the year when nobody listens to albums anymore". My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was voted best album in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll for 2010, winning by the largest margin in the poll's history. The singles "Power", "Runaway", and "Monster" were voted in the top-10 of the Pazz & Jop's singles list. This is the third instance in which a Kanye West album topped the Pazz & Jop's annual critics' poll, followed by The College Dropout in 2004 and Late Registration in 2005; Yeezus would eventually be the fourth in 2013. Metacritic, which collates reviews of music albums, named it the best-reviewed album of 2010. In 2012, Rolling Stone ranked the album number 353 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and Complex included it in their list of "25 Rap Albums From the Past Decade That Deserve Classic Status". Entertainment Weekly named it 8th best album of all time on their 2013 list. In October 2013, Complex named it the best hip hop album of the last five years. NME ranked the album at 24 on their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list. In August 2014, the song "Runaway" (featuring Pusha T) was ranked in the third position in Pitchfork Media's list of the 200 "best tracks" released since 2010. During the same week, the publication named it the best album of the 2010s decade — between 2010 and 2014 — commenting, "West broke the ground upon which the new decade's most brilliant architects built their masterworks; Bon Iver, Take Care, Channel Orange, and good kid, m.A.A.d city don’t exist without the blueprint of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The list ends here because it’s where the decade truly begins." The critics' aggregation site Acclaimed Music has found My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to be the 73rd most celebrated album in the history of popular music."
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Pity only the first album was any good.
 

DWelbz19

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SteveJ said:
The two go hand-in-hand, IMO - he provides such 'good copy' that he's the Mourinho of music for the press, regardless of actual public interest or its lack. Same as his wife's family: their show's ratings are awful; much of the public can't stand them; but they're easy & reliable fodder for newspapers, mags and websites, so they're in our faces 24/7. All this is the illusion of talent and popularity rather than the reality. Kanye's marriage is designed for mutual publicity and is known to be contractual in other ways beyond the usual pre-up agreements and so on.
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Aye, very much. Allegedly Kim reads pretty much near enough every article about her online, she even tweeted the Daily Mail just the other day because they led with a headline she didn't like, and they actually changed it afterwards.

I don't know about the 'illusion of talent' relating to Kanye, though. He has churned some very talented music throughout the years.
 

Henrik Larsson

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The moment when you suddenly feel old is the moment you realize the delicious chick in this vid:






Is now 50 years old. Stacey Dash.
 

DWelbz19

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Henrik Larsson said:
The moment when you suddenly feel old is the moment you realize the delicious chick in this vid:
Is now 50 years old. Stacey Dash.
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And she's a bit of a fruitcake now. Does things like demanding we rid Black History month. I'm sure she said something last year about rape victims being 'bad girls', and analogised it to 'guns not killing people, people doing it' with the guns being alcohol and rape being 'people'.
 

Henrik Larsson

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DWelbz19 said:
And she's a bit of a fruitcake now. Does things like demanding we rid Black History month. I'm sure she said something last year about rape victims being 'bad girls', and analogised it to 'guns not killing people, people doing it' with the guns being alcohol and rape being 'people'.
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Now why doesn't this surprise me. Just saw she's the niece of Damon Dash too, that's a name I hadn't heard in a while either :lol:
 

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Henrik Larsson said:
The moment when you suddenly feel old is the moment you realize the delicious chick in this vid:






Is now 50 years old. Stacey Dash.
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Also the moment you realise that Kanye West is absolutely terrible these days and no longer even a rapper relative to his earlier material. Pop nonsense.
 

sullydnl

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Yeezus is many things but pop definitely ain't one of them.
 

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Did anyone see that talk Kanye gave at Oxford? He took one question, about aesthetics, then talked for an hour about how awesome Kanye is. It was pretty cool.
 

Mciahel Goodman

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He's a good producer, was a decent lyricist (not much evidence of that for a few years now). That's it.
 

Mciahel Goodman

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Adzzz said:
So? He's a musical artist why would he limit himself to rap? Also, he still raps on both those albums. Maybe you should try them again dude.
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Nah, I painfully listened to both. It's a hybrid of something that isn't rap. It's just the way hip hop has gone... to shit.
 

Mciahel Goodman

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Although, I will admit, his production is revolutionary. In that aspect, he's miles ahead of anyone else. The Dre for the new century, but probably better compared to George Martin. As a rapper, just not for me.
 

Adzzz

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All of his big hits were much more 'pop-ish' than anything he did from 808s onwards... so he 'anti' sold-out and gets hated for it. It doesn't matter though, everyone is entitled to an opinion but he's gotten better not worse, in mine, he's more avant garde now and does his own thing but with some perspicacity it's evident that at heart he's actually making similar music - just now he gets soul singers to sing the words he wants (Bound 2, ULB etc) and his instrumentation is bolder and more abrasive. It's fine to not to like it but as an artist he is undeniably a creative force for good.
 

Mciahel Goodman

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Adzzz said:
All of his big hits were much more 'pop-ish' than anything he did from 808s onwards... so he 'anti' sold-out and gets hated for it. It doesn't matter though, everyone is entitled to an opinion but he's gotten better not worse, in mine, he's more avant garde now and does his own thing but with some perspicacity it's evident that at heart he's actually making similar music - just now he gets soul singers to sing the words he wants (Bound 2, ULB etc) and his instrumentation is bolder and more abrasive. It's fine to not to like it but as an artist he is undeniably a creative force for good.
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I don't doubt his talent or artistry, it just doesn't fit within the genre of rap that I've become accustomed to over the last couple of decades (90s onwards). Avant-garde is correct.

The big hits of his earlier career had a social commentary which was much more prevalent and easier to relate to. His new stuff, and whatever messages inherent within in, is drowned out by production, which though exquisite, leaves me wanting something else.

I don't think it's rap, and I can't classify it as hip hop. I'm not sure what his new stuff his, but I'm not a huge fan. I loved his first two albums*, and not just the hits. But, as you say, this is all relative and subjective.

*First three albums actually. I prefer the old Kanye, you prefer the new. That's fair enough.

Actually, I'll add Cruel Summer to the list. That was brilliant.
 

sullydnl

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Mciahel Goodman said:
On Yeezus? All of them.
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A quick google of Yeezus reviews...

"Our greatest pop mind has made his antipop record"

"Yeezus - Kanye's anti-pop record"

"If MBDTF was pop, then Yeezus is anti-pop."

"With Yeezus, the world's most polarizing pop star has gone and dropped a polarising anti-pop record"

"... fans seem to be split about the abrasive, anti-pop album..."

"...almost in spite of its anti-pop intentions..."

"Yeezus is an anti-mainstream, anti-pop, assault on sensibility and reason"

"And so, at its core, Yeezus is an anti-pop record."

"...to me they really exemplify Kanye's desire to make an "antipop" album..."

"Kanye West's new album Yeezus is a study in contemporary anti-pop by the modern king of the genre."

"His last album, Yeezus, was an anti-pop manifesto, without one radio single."

"Kanye had finally made his great anti-pop statement."

What does anti mean again? :p
 

Mciahel Goodman

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sullydnl said:
A quick google of Yeezus reviews...

"Our greatest pop mind has made his antipop record"

"Yeezus - Kanye's anti-pop record"

"If MBDTF was pop, then Yeezus is anti-pop."

"With Yeezus, the world's most polarizing pop star has gone and dropped a polarising anti-pop record"

"... fans seem to be split about the abrasive, anti-pop album..."

"...almost in spite of its anti-pop intentions..."

"Yeezus is an anti-mainstream, anti-pop, assault on sensibility and reason"

"And so, at its core, Yeezus is an anti-pop record."

"...to me they really exemplify Kanye's desire to make an "antipop" album..."

"Kanye West's new album Yeezus is a study in contemporary anti-pop by the modern king of the genre."

"His last album, Yeezus, was an anti-pop manifesto, without one radio single."

"Kanye had finally made his great anti-pop statement."

What does anti mean again? :p
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The reverse of, or opposite to?

But these are opinions, which don't (and never can) prove anything besides people sharing similar opinions. Just as a reading of Macbeth will produce a plethora of critics who reach agreement and form consensus, it doesn't represent the truth of the matter, merely a popularly held position. Others will disagree, perhaps smaller in number, and hence we have critical debate of both music and literature.
 

Mciahel Goodman

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By the way, search Yeezus and "anti-rap" to find those disagreements I mention.
 
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