Post by dance of days on Feb 9, 2011 17:53:45 GMT -5
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I'm having a huge "college student" moment right now: I just started listening to the latest album by Kanye West and am totally blown away by looking at it in the context of pop culture hegemony and discourse/history/context and black history...most of the lyrics are complete braggadocio, sex-obsessed, narcissistic, materialistic, over-the-top indulgent, put to hard beats with a ton of samples including Black Sabbath (there's a song where he actually sings "No more drugs for me/pussy and religion is all I need" to the tune of "Iron Man"...what the fuck?! SO INTENSE), collaborating with Bon Iver etc., and using autotuning (on "Lost in the World") in the style of Daft Punk-style electronica (incredibly "white" music, historically speaking), but then going into this gospel-style chorus...it's like this mindblowing amalgamation of all popular music of the last X number of years, streamlined into single songs, the ultimate pop bricolage, set to these nasty indulgent lyrics, and THEN--here's the kicker--he ends the album with a song whose chorus is "I'm lost in the world," and it goes right into "Who Will Survive in America," a sample track of a Gil Scott Heron spoken word piece outlining the total oppression of black Americans, which is a TOTAL surprise after a whole album of indulgent lyrical narcissism, and it leaves the whole album with this unspoken subtext of "You made me what I am"...it's so chilling and fascinating to me.
Kanye is notorious for being crazy and also an asshole, I can totally imagine him using that last spoken word piece simply as a way to make his album look "serious" and "credible," and apparently he caught a lot of flak for using it, but if this was all planned, the guy must be a mastermind...it's a huge pop cultural statement for 2011, an absolute phenomenon. It's generation-defining. I feel like I should go write an essay about this or something.
Thoughts?
I'm having a huge "college student" moment right now: I just started listening to the latest album by Kanye West and am totally blown away by looking at it in the context of pop culture hegemony and discourse/history/context and black history...most of the lyrics are complete braggadocio, sex-obsessed, narcissistic, materialistic, over-the-top indulgent, put to hard beats with a ton of samples including Black Sabbath (there's a song where he actually sings "No more drugs for me/pussy and religion is all I need" to the tune of "Iron Man"...what the fuck?! SO INTENSE), collaborating with Bon Iver etc., and using autotuning (on "Lost in the World") in the style of Daft Punk-style electronica (incredibly "white" music, historically speaking), but then going into this gospel-style chorus...it's like this mindblowing amalgamation of all popular music of the last X number of years, streamlined into single songs, the ultimate pop bricolage, set to these nasty indulgent lyrics, and THEN--here's the kicker--he ends the album with a song whose chorus is "I'm lost in the world," and it goes right into "Who Will Survive in America," a sample track of a Gil Scott Heron spoken word piece outlining the total oppression of black Americans, which is a TOTAL surprise after a whole album of indulgent lyrical narcissism, and it leaves the whole album with this unspoken subtext of "You made me what I am"...it's so chilling and fascinating to me.
Kanye is notorious for being crazy and also an asshole, I can totally imagine him using that last spoken word piece simply as a way to make his album look "serious" and "credible," and apparently he caught a lot of flak for using it, but if this was all planned, the guy must be a mastermind...it's a huge pop cultural statement for 2011, an absolute phenomenon. It's generation-defining. I feel like I should go write an essay about this or something.
Thoughts?