right. I enjoyed Beck's album. I listened to it plenty. But yeah, it was just Sea Change 2.0 - which isn't all that interesting to me.

Aight i can't hate on the songs you posted and thanks for sharing.. here is my issue. Those were four songs.. shit even Game got seven very conscious and positive tunes. Im not hating legitimately im asking how many more are conscious tunes by Kanye? What is the ratio of conscious to nonsense?

And again i aint hatin, im askin. It been a long time since i sat and checked out kanye records so i can't remember. You ain't got to post all the lyrics, just the number and possibly names and i will check it.

For example here are the Game tracks i mentioned (and no, i would never argue Game is a conscious rapper or even a positive rapper)...

Truth Rap
Let Us Live
Letter to the King
Olde English
Angel (feat common and yes Kanye)
Why you hate?
Walk Thru Da Sky

Angel is so good.

Kanye also produced "dreams" for game btw.

suchfriends, part of what makes Kanye so compelling to me is his contradictions. He is basically a walking contradiction. Look at an early track like "All Falls Down" or a recent one like "New Slaves," and yet he's so materialistic. Remember the two sides of Pac? The reason Ye talks so much shit is because the only person who hates Kanye more than "you" is Kanye.

I point to 2 notable moments, both happening around 2007. (1) he broke out of the mold of the sort of geeky producer dude and became a superstar, and (2) his mom died.

He's not coped with either well I think.

Later tracks are filled with decadence and debauchery but for the most part they don't sound fun. Sure he's got "Good Life," but at the same time he peppers lyrics with cries for help. He's pointed to lots of addictions. Alcohol and sex being the 2 most obvious. Materialism a close 3rd.

But the drinking doesn't sound like celebrating. "the plan was to drink until the pain's over, but what's worse? The pain or the hangover?"

Even his sex talk can be offset by "Runaway" which is what? A 9 minute excercise in self-loathing because he doesn't know how to treat women. Or what about fucking "Blame Game"? It's brutal.

Check out any of the tracks I've mentioned (minus "Good Life") and you might start to see why he's so interesting to some of us.

Yes Pac is conflicted, but it seems that Pac was always cognizant of this and honest to always accept or concede his mistakes. However overall Pac's music canon contains more conscious statements than not, ESPECIALLY IN HIS INTERVIEWS. For example Kanye sometimes insinuates that his real issue with grammys or media is racism, yet he is too nervous to harm his career to be as forceful about it as he could. Can you imagine Pac being that cautious? But its not fair to compare pac and kanye, they have such a radically different background, personality, and approach to their art.
Also remember Kanye is older, married, and has a child, so it is almost shocking that the relatively younger Pac seemed to own up to his own contradictions more so than kanye. Admittedly both were narcissistic to a fault, and it got Pac killed for not fully understanding the game he was caught up in..
Me? I just so rarely like to fox with unconscious rap regardless of who made it. Even groups loke Bone Thugz had their positive moments. That negative rap falls out of my collection, im like Rob Instigator, i like my hip hop to be about something.

Im not hating (well entirely as i will admit im not really into even the "sound" of kanye) just have a different reason for listening to hip hop.

and Wouldn't Get Far - my fav out of their collabs.

First four albums.. And WTT.

yeah.. Homecoming and Murder to Excellence come to mind.

are y'all still sleeping on the new Kendrick song?

Well said. And yes to Runaway (Kanye's most compelling and powerful musical statement) and Blame Game as being excellent examples of Kanye's self-hatred and identity confusion. I'd like to submit "Hold My Liquor" for consideration as well.

speaking of The Game.. are you guys aware he's been working on The Documentary 2 and Dr. Dre helped?

let's face it. Kayne ain't no Frank Zappa when it comes to artistic creativity, politics or anything else.

love him or not. he's the sign of the times.

great producer but he's ignorant as fuck!!! i guess he's wonderfull because he's the first mainstream hip hop artist that keeps up with some sort of indie culture, but that was bound to happen because of the internet.

maybe he's jealous of Jay-Z because he ended up with the strong he got the shaft with the leftover trash that was a common want with hip hop artist of the time considering how many ditzy big assed women there are out there.

i second that "Hold my Liquor". his greatest song.

I've heard rumors. i'm excited.

yooo, DRAKE JUST DROPPED A SURPRISE MIXTAPE!! http://t.co/KcZooNLcPE

read that Drake just released a bunch of throwaways so he can get out of his 4 album contract in Cash Money, his real album "Views from the 6" will come out later this year.

--

not really feeling the tape. maybe i'm not in the mood.. maybe it'll grow on me. but right now it's pretty boring.


EDIT: i woke up in the wrong mood, but now i'm giving it another shot, and i can't believe i'm saying this, i'm not only enjoying it this time, but also getting blown away by it. :eek:

the last few songs are so beautiful. i'm starting to think this might be Drake's best project to date, in some ways. wow man. wow.

Drake is such a good rapper now.

i'm sorry for Lupe, Joey, Wayne and Rae Sremmurd.. but THIS is the best rap project of the year (so far).

Damn that was a 180 haha i will listen soon

Well you're nothing if not infectious in your enthusiasm for music. I'll give it a whirl when I'm heading over to Manchester tomorrow. Highly anticipated review will be up Sunday probably.

Which is sadly why i been such a hater this year.. i just ain't feelin nothin coming out

You're wrong.

Kanye West is musically inventive, artistically creative, etc., only not in a "traditional" way... he's not a genius in a medium that has been universally validated as a legitimate art form in its own right.

So no, he's not a Mozart or a Hendrix or even a Richard D. James kind of figure, but he also doesn't have the benefit of existing within a pre-defined archetypal space. Hendrix was a guitarist... he was a a musician in a very literal sense, and his brilliance came from his obliteration of the die cast by his presecessors.

It's funny that you mention Zappa though, because in a way that's exactly the kind of genius Kanye West is. Zappa was not a conventional rock figure, he was a pop culture amalgum and an absurdist. Critical darling only to the most forward thinking of critics, and commercial anomaly. Now that time and reflection have given us a few other Zappa-esque figures to help define his place in music (Beefheart, John Zorn, Waits, the fucking Butthole Surfers, maybe Beck, Daniel Johnston, Calvin Johnson, Flaming Lips) Frank Zappa can be put into perspective and acknowledged as the godfather of weird ass, genre-splicing, mad scientist. But at the start of his career he was a polarizing, love him or hate him kind of guy.

Kanye West has proven himself to be the most unlikely kind of visionary. He's cut his teeth in a field that had no real icons until the death of J Dilla turned beat making and hip hop production into an art form of its own, with or without the accompaniment of an emcee.

Puff Daddy used to grab samples and turn them into new tracks in the stupidest and most boring way possible: by just plain rapping over a classic piece of a song from another time. Kanye learned the the right way to use samples to form new beats under No ID. He perfected it, I believe, with "Otis," which literally chops an Otis Redding sample into unrecognizable micro-cuts which provide the framework for a song made of another song. This has been his legacy as a beat-writer: erasing puff daddy from historical relevance by making the sample legitimate.

One could argue that this was something that millions of drum n' bass and hip hop artists have strived for over the years, but In Kanye's hands, the beat has been taken out of the background. Sure, other artists like DJ Premiere, Pete Rock, and Dilla all devoted their careers to similar goals, but.... How many of them branched out into actual rapping, singing, song-writing, general production and cross-genre pop culture iconography so successfully that even the critics who HATE him think his music is brilliant, and even the consumers who hate him hate him because of his wife, his obnoxiousness, his God complex, and how much the world loves him?

He's fucking brilliant. If you think he's not artistic then you must think hip-hop isn't an art.

Seriously he's basically been a Beatle for the past 10 years. His brilliance is not really up for debate anymore. He couldn't kill his career if he tried. Short of taking up a reclusive life of private child abuse, nothing's going to fuck up his legacy now.