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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
Re: Kanye
I have acquired his first 4 albums and am forcing myself to listen to them through 2 or 3 times each. I will let you know my thoughts if I make it through. So far so boring.
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I thought you'd done this months ago.
Then again, you are the same Rob Insigator who has been reading
** "Book of the New Sun" for a YEAR now, and only made it to the second novella.
Anyway... I actually thought
College Dropout was boring for a while too, except for "Jesus Walks" and a few other tracks. I have no idea why you're giving those albums a shot, when they're almost guaranteed to sound old and unimpressive to someone first hearing them in 2017, but whatever.
College Dropout was kind of like the
Pablo Honey of hip-hop for me for the longest time. But it's actually a really great album all the way through. The skits on those albums reminds me that there IS actually a time and a place for skits, and there IS a way to include skits on an album without making the album less good. It's his least mature album by far, but that doesn't mean it isn't heads and tails above most of the rest of the shit that was dropping in '04.
Late Registration is where he really took flight. That album is not even in the same stratosphere as
College Dropout. It's the most thorough defeat of the "sophomore slump" EVER. He went from making good, nicely produced, fresh and topical hip-hop (maybe the Hard Day's Night of his career) right into making his
Rubber Soul in just one year. I also struggled with
LR because it sounded so atypical, so ... almost antithetical to everything I believed about hip-hop. But in truth, it's probably my second or third favorite West album at this point. If you can listen to "Gone" without feeling the urge to dance, followed by the urge to drop your jaw at the beautiful simplicity of the instrumentation (note: the string interlude after Consequence's verse, just before Kanye's second starts, in particular), then you probably don't have a soul.
As for the others, well... I've liked
Graduation and
808s & Heartbreak since I first heard them. Liked the latter before I had even committed to liking Kanye West! So... I don't know man. If you can't find ANYTHING to appreciate in any of those extremely different albums, then I really think the problem is you. Those are the albums from back when Kanye had the world fully by the balls. The average non-Kanye fan is, from my experience, likely to enjoy at least some of that material.
But if you listen and still hate, and still insist that "non-genius" Kanye -- the guy whose album taught "hip-hop genius" Future how to make a career is shit, then do the same thing with the 2010-2016 albums. For me?
** (Seriously bro, get moving on that one! Next time you want to put it down for a big tome on quantum mechanics or ornithology, just forge on through BOTNS instead. I guarantee there is more to satisfy your hunger for knowledge and thought in "Book of the New Sun" than in any dry navel-gazing book this side of the fucking Bible... which you love. BOTNS is, when taken as a whole (including its sequels and codes) VERY biblical in scope and subject matter, so READ THEM SHITS YOU DUMMY!)