Okay Kanye, You Can Stay

I wouldn’t characterise myself as a particularly massive fan of Kanye West. I love College Dropout, it’s very difficult not to (I mean come on, how the blue blazes did he ever find this sample) and there are some phenomenal tracks on Late Registration and Graduation (Good Morning was my alarm-clock for at least 3 years) but as complete works they don’t hold together anywhere near as well. He’s definitely always appealed to me more as a sampler and producer than as an MC, but like many others his stage persona vexes me. Sometimes he’s hilarious, insurgent and tongue-in-cheek (the ad he did with Kobe Bryant is hysterical) and other times he just seems to be getting in his own way. There is nothing good to be gleaned from his highly ill-advised tirade against a wheelchair-bound fan who for obvious reasons wouldn’t get up and dance during a show.

 

More recently this inflated egotism has bled into his music more and more and corrupted it, you can’t listen to to Yeezus without being reminded of it at almost every turn. My theory is that he always planned to kind of try and subvert the famous rapper persona, and in so doing give it a bit more depth, but he just comes across as a self-aggrandizing naked emperor most of the time, tragically unaware of his own ludicrousness. One thing I will always say in his defense though is that he is fantastic at using his status to help bring other artists out into the light. He’s produced some of hip-hop’s most iconic tracks (Talib Kweli’s ‘Get By’ and Dead Prez’s ‘It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop’ for example) and he’s chosen some amazing artists to feature on his albums and in his live performances. Cyhi the Prynce, Pusha T, Lunice, Benji B and numerous others have gained a great deal of acclaim with Kanye’s help.

At the Brit Awards, he made use of his ability to bring important artists to greater light in a wonderful way, simultaneously validating and condemning the UK’s largest music award ceremony. His live performance was amazing in and of itself as they tend to be, as he debuted a brand new track and lit the O2 Arena up with goddamn flamethrowers in a display that put The Crazy World of Arthur Brown to shame. Behind all the pyrotechnics though, West had gathered a group of darkly hooded individuals on stage with him who upon closer examination turned out to all be notable UK garage/grime artists. Skepta was up there, so was Fekky, Jammer, Krept & Konan were there, Novelist too, the list goes on. None of them dropped any bars, but Kanye made a solid point of justifying their inclusion with a roar of “Wake up Britain! You’re ignoring your most talented peoples.”

 

He’s far from wrong, I could complain about the farcical nature of award ceremonies for music until I’m blue in the face, but the Brit Awards are the crown jewel of awful, they represent the worst of the British music industry, the willful propensity to ignore just how much amazing talent is really out there. London is the most important laboratory in electronic music, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, it all started there and innovations are happening practically on a weekly basis. I’ve spoken in detail about the significance of the UK hip-hop scene and grime is a huge part of that as well. Yet the kind of thing that gets recognised on a broader scale is either some half-arsed imitation of American music or something that might have started out in the London Underground but has been so bloated and mistreated by scores of producers and focus group tests that by the time it reaches your ears it bears no resemblance to its origins.

Fame is a confusing beast, some people are absorbed by it, some obsess over it, some conquer it and some try to renovate it, with varying levels of success. Kanye has been far from universally successful, but he’s done a hell of a lot better than many other and although his arrogance has molded him into a fairly unpleasant individual in many ways (his technical crew rarely have much nice to say about him) he clearly recognises that he can use his position to help other artists. The face of hip-hop is changing, abstract sampling and production styles are becoming more welcome and more complex, storied lyrics are becoming the norm. Kanye West is not on that frontier, Kendrick Lamar is, but ask yourself, which artist has Lamar toured with more than any other? Kanye West. As much as people like to think of him as a having a god complex, he is clearly very much aware that in fact, it’s not all about him.

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