Monday, November 22, 2010

Kanye receives plaudits


Full score for Kanye's latest opus at Pop Matters, P'fork and Rolling Stone. The P'fork write-up spends too much space delving into the backstories that may or may not have had an impact on the creative process, and way too little on the album itself. The other two work better: the PopMatters review, among other things, discusses the filmatic aspect of the record, while Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone inevitably -- but perhaps fittingly -- calls it a "rock-star manifesto". But I take issue with this excerpt:

"Nobody else is making music this daring and weird"

If I were nice, I'd call it hyperbole. In reality, though, it's just plain wrong, and doesn't serve the review well. A truer statement, if one really needs to include it, would be "Nobody this popular is making popular sounding music this daring and weird."

Sometimes, no matter how excited you may be, holding back a bit just makes more sense.

1 comment:

Chris said...

Yup. Kanye is to mainstream hip hop what Coldplay is to mainstream rock. Formula: Take things that were happening in the indie segments of their relative genres 10 years prior, smooth out the edges, watch the general populace go nuts.

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