Many books about hip-hop work at a broader level of analysis, and I'm glad that this work (well, this series) focused on the records themselves. The author argues for the cultural importance of Kanye and that his works deserve serious scholarly attention. Rick Ross's part on "Devil in a New Dress" which is almost as good as Yeezy's). These faults notwithstanding the book itself was indeed quite interesting and some of the analysis of Kanye and his work (and a bit about his collaborators although there should have been more on them, e.g. Worse, there was no explicit framework through which to read the album itself. The analysis of the former was cogent but the latter was inconsistent, sometimes taking the album portion of the book to talk about Dante or use rhetorical questions to support a spurious assertion. This book is about two things: (1) Kanye West as pop cultural icon, with a dynamic persona, discussed mostly right before the release of MBDTF and (2) the album MBDTF itself. The vocabulary is excusable but when combined with the other aspects it became laughable. This book is the most overwritten text I have ever read, in terms of prose style, vocabulary, hyperbole, and cultural references. Graves did a great job of helping me quietly geek out and reminisce. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of my favourite Yeezy records ever and Mr. It was a fun ride, a quick read and really just got me going. As far as music writing goes, I really feel like Graves knows his shit. I really liked the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of each song and how detailed Graves got into the structure and creation of each song, but moreover - I love how Graves discussed the angels and demons Kanye battles, builds up, tears down, explains and exemplifies on each track. Graves thinks about the current state of affairs of the Yeezy enterprise. It made me wonder about how Kanye went from MBDTF to his most recent release, ye. Reading this book, I felt like I was wearing a VR headset, watching and examining all the moments and thought-processes, songs, music-video concepts and daydreams and nightmares that make me love the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album so much. I mean the way that Kirk Walker Graves writes, you can tell that he fucking stans Yeezy soooooo hard and it made it so easy to slide into all the metaphors he was laying down. Kanye West only cares about one person, Kanye West.Īnyway, I loved this contribution to the 33 1/3 series because it was wild. However, If I'm honest, it's all my fault that I'm mad because I fell into Yeezy's meticulously developed plan to make us, black people, feel like he gave a fuck about us, black people. It just makes me so upset, who Kanye has become. I'm so fucking mad at a Kanye West right now. I've had this book for so long and just decided to read it because I wanted to reminisce about when times were good and things made sense. Sampling and ventriloquizing the pop music past to tell the story of its future - very much a tale of our culture's wish for unfettered digital ubiquity - MBDTF is the album of its time, an aesthetic self-acquittal and spiritual autobiography of our era's most dynamic artist. Swallowing the chaos wrought by his public persona and digesting it as a grandiose allegory of self-redemption, Kanye sublimates his narcissism to paint masterstroke after masterstroke on MBDTF, a 69-minute hymn to egotistical excess. In a cloud-based and on-demand culture - a place of increasing virtualization, loneliness, and hyper-connectivity - West straddles this critical moment as what David Samuels of The Atlantic calls "the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music." In the land of taking a selfie, honing a personal brand, and publicly melting down online, Kanye West is the undisputed king. Having risen from obscurity as a precocious producer through the ranks of Jay Z's Roc-A-Fella records, by the time he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF) in late 2010, West had evolved into a master collagist, an alchemist capable of transfiguring semi-obscure soul samples and indelible beats into a brash and vulnerable new art form.Ī look at the arc of his career, from the heady chipmunk soul exuberance of The College Dropout (2004) to the operatic narcissism of MBDTF, tells us about the march of pop music into the digital age and, by extension, the contradictions that define our cultural epoch. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Kanye West created the most compelling body of pop music by an American artist during the period.
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