Kanye West, Yeezus, 6/18/13 (TBC because who knows anymore)

Scott, please tell me you will review this once it drops

I don't get why he sounds so angry on his solo-album, but much happier on his collaborative efforts? Never-the-less, I liked MBDTF and like the new songs.

― Frederik B, Monday, May 20, 2013 7:41 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like if you really listen to Kanye's verses on Watch The Throne and Cruel Summer they're not really that 'happy'

Lots of good points itt about the fruitless narcissism of Kanye's anger and the way he tries to aggrandise it by pegging it to some wider political point that he'll probably never mention again. I've fallen for that before.

i dig kanye as national avatar so when he gets petulant and enraged and namechecks abuses of late capitalism like he's being frogmarched into a dystopian future by his own id it works fine for me

^

Twitter going nuts that one of the SNL songs is basically Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People"

just listening to this for the first time now and was about to make the same comment

this is the greatest thing he's done since "Love Lockdown"

okay "New Slaves" is pretty dope too

Mellow Gold: The College Dropout - the instaclassic debut of a generational icon
Odelay: Late Registration - proof this is not a flash in the pan
Midnite Vultures: Graduation - more of the shtick
Sea Change: 808s & Heartbreak - can't do the shtick right now because WAHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Guero: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - return of the shtick, sadness overcome but not forgotten
The Information: Yeezus?

mellow gold is pretty bad, does anyone consider it a classic? also you skipped the indie beck albums.

but don't let me fuck up your thinkpiece

mellow gold made spins top 100 alternative albums of all time upon release, and yeah i skipped side-projects and shit, this isn't a fucking scientific formula

that's like 15 hours of your life you'll never get back listening to those albums, anthony.

mellow gold is mostly great

One Foot in the Grave totally fucks up yr thesis tho nice ommission

Mutations too for that matter

think of what you could have done in that time. road trip to canada. acid trip. hot dog eating contest. all kinds of things.

scott that took me five minutes. this isn't a thesis it's a pair of testicles resting on your forehead

i'm surprised that a record store clerk would think that kind of bullshit takes actual time and effort

forehead? yr doing it wrong

dunno feels nice to me

i like these. i think i will actually want to listen to this album.

MBDTF always sounded closer to Watch the Throne than anything that came before it imo

no i meant listening to the albums is 15 hours of your life you'll never get back.

scott, why are you posting in this thread? you could be eating hot dogs, watching baywatch, google searching for pictures of cool helicopters etc etc

also a baffling thing for a record store clerk to say xpost

besides i'm a dude in my 30s you know I spent more than 15 hours listening to beck in my life

you could be eating hot dogs, watching baywatch, google searching for pictures of cool helicopters etc etc

― illegalblues, Monday, May 20, 2013 2:44 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Kids today can do all this at once.

yeah, but are they really getting the full experience of any of those things? sometimes less is more

I'd rather be eating cool helicopters, watching hot dogs, and google searching for pictures of Baywatch

You would do that, Tony Stark.

I prefer cool dogs and hot helicopters myself.

I'm just being silly. I know how much you dopes love beck and kanye. for what i's worth, I enjoy hearing loser and where it's at on the radio. I could never listen to a whole album of either of them though. seems like work.

scott have u considered that u have probably spent over 15 hours of your own life reading ilx posts about beck

I have not either! I think the first thread I started on ilx was about beck though.

I can read about lots of people though. reading is fun.

yeah, reading is cool. i was reading stuff on Larry Bird today and wow what a guy

Magic was better

Jordan game 6.

pffft, picking Magic over Bird is like picking ihop over a perfect ribeye

lol @ "Midnite Vultures: Graduation - more of the shtick"

Not the MV reception that I remember!

scattershot and nothing really sticks but at least he got it off his chest.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ernest-owens/kanye-west-new-slaves_b_3300051.html

when debating whether someone is worthy of their cult of personality, "hypocrisy" is always a tough move. Anyone successful criticizing the culture that allowed their success is a hypocrite. Hard to distinguish between the reasons a song doesn't resonate and why the singer doesn't come off as heroic. I think people tend to conflate that, esp with Kanye

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/on-listening-to-new-slaves-with-white-people

ugh why can't white people just understand anything

i thought it was more of a "capitalism makes slaves of us all" than a "black folks are still slaves" thing. i guess i was wrong.

the first thing i think of naturally is prime minister sinister pete nice's immortal line "ears hang trunk in a slave hold". but i would.

kanye fever:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/05/21/185781341/kanye-west-stands-alone

http://globalgrind.com/music/kanye-west-most-dangerous-black-man-america-blog

I'm a little iffy on Kanye's political stuff but that HuffPo piece is dreadful.

I hate to go down the "you just don't get this artist" road but man, that HuffPo piece. If you can listen to Kanye West and think he isn't grappling with the contradictions of promoting and lamenting "black materialistic adoration", then I'm not even sure we're listening to the same artist. How well he grapples with that is another conversation entirely, but it's not like he's unaware he's as much a product of the shit he's criticizing as anyone else is.

Also how hard is it to google an artist's charity work before insisting that they don't give back at all?

I don't even feel right using the word "promoting" because that implies some degree of aspiration. If there's one thing I've taken away from Kanye West music it's that for all the surface glammer of it, when it gets right down to it I shouldn't aspire to be Kanye West.