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Originally Posted by rebeccagotcursedout
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.
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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.