I'm-a get on this TV, mama...

[weasel-seeker.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether this is kosher, but in the midst of a discussion about Kanye West's concert tour and his status as POPSTAR/not, Lex suggested I float the idea here to see what people thought. I honestly tried to come up with something concise, but the following piece spewed itself forth instead. Apologies. Plus, at the end of it, I'm still not quite sure what Kanye is.

“The meteor shower wasn’t enough. If we want to restart the ship, we’re going to need the biggest star in the universe!” This is the culminating moment of Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark Tour, and the moment it became clear that Kanye is the latest, and quite possibly the first, rap artist to transition into the role of POP STAR. West’s set was an elaborate (and nonsensical) stage show, consisting of ‘Ye traveling through space with his computer Jane (shades of Ender’s Game, perhaps?). Kanye crashes on a planet and the ship breaks. He sings. Aliens show up and try to fix the ship, but don’t have enough power. The aliens realize that Kanye is the BIGGEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE and can power his own spaceship all the way back to earth. In the interim: "Jane, I haven't had a woman in SO LONG. I need some pussy!" "Maybe I can help you with that." "How can you help me? You're nothing but a stupid broken spaceship that won't fly" Cue holographic Gold Woman Cyborg thing. Cue Gold Digger. Kanye has sex with a hologram. Kanye dreams about his mom. The ghost of Rihanna sings Don’t Stop Believin’. Kanye goes home. The End.

Throughout the entire show, Kanye remains the sole person on stage, the sole centre of attention, bathed in light and synths and sound, larger than life, lonely, exuberant, and eager to please. Hip-hop shows, more often than not, lean towards a block party vibe, emphasizing a sense of community and connection with the audience. koganbot characterizes this as a standard aspect of black music from church through to funk: “the audience is part of the form of the music, the structure; no audience, and the call gets no response.” In the fall, Talib Kweli opened his shows with a DJ spinning a set of ‘classic’ hip-hop, vocals dropping out frequently, allowing the audience to take over. Montreal, London, Washington, might not be Kweli’s native Brooklyn, but membership in the community of hip-hop is established via knowledge of the past. Halfway through the show he brings Jean Grae on-stage to join him for a song and do three of her own. Dizzee Rascal trades lines back and forth with his hype man. Kanye stands on stage solitary and unreachable, the self-proclaimed biggest star in the universe, and thus (supposedly) unassailable and unable to connect with anyone else.

The College Dropout is a classic because it epitomizes hip-hop and bridges the gap between its disparate factions and false dichotomies. Kanye brags that he’s “the first nigga with a Benz and a backpack”, able to “take Freeway, throw him on tracks with Mos Def / call him Kwa-li or Kwe-li, I put him on songs with Jay-Z.” Packed to the gills with guest appearances, from the people who gave ‘Ye a leg up to those to whom he’s paying it forward. From political screeds about education and AIDS to sex jams to braggadaccio to family dinners, The College Dropout feels detailed, lived in, real and warm, using soul samples and bringing them into the hip-hop template. Kanye feels like a multifaceted, real person. Kanye’s fears and neuroses aren’t poverty or violence, but respect and relationships. Respect from critics, respect from his family, respect from his peers and respect from the world at large. Success is relative to the perception and expectations of others. “Ain’t nobody expected Kanye to end up on top / they expected that college dropout to drop and then flop.” Not look at my money (which he already had made as a producer). Not look at my popularity. Not look at my attitude. Not look at my strength or my gun. But this: I defied your expectations: love me!

Ambition groundless, the next album is the first indication that Kanye wants to ‘transcend’, to be more than just a rap star. In Renegade, Jay-Z, the only other rap artist who has so consistently crossed-over into the popular culture, “penetrate[s] pop culture / bring[ing] ‘em a lot closer to the block.” He recruits Lil Orphan Annie and makes her sing a Ghetto Anthem. Kanye wants to break out of the ghetto. Bringing in Jon Brion to decorate the album with strings and marimba, Late Registration aimed for critical respect, stretching out songs to 8 minutes plus, layering them with musical intricacy and multiple levels of meaning. While Late Registration keeps the soul and jazz samples that are the bread and butter of New York rap production, the samples begin to dominate the songs, functioning as the chorus (Gold Digger, Gone), or overwhelming the verses (Touch the Sky) and almost always providing the fundamental structure and tone of songs. And Kanye spends both the album’s lead single and much of the album self-consciously defending his own extravagance and public behaviour, dedicating an entire track to haters, Bring Me Down. His social conscience is muted and usually in service of illustrating his inner conflicts, rather than vice versa, and his two ‘family’ songs Roses and Hey Mama are as much about him as they are about others, in contrast to Family Business.

By Graduation, Kanye’s abandoned guests raps on all but one track, eliminated all traces of skits (which can be tiresome, but can also be funny and are a staple of rap albums) and pared album length down to 13 tracks (from his previous albums’ 20+). Gone too are Kanye’s lyrical specificities. Kanye’s self-obsession proved fascinating on his first two albums in part due to their detail. Intricate stories that previously sketched complete pictures of internal conflicts, tensions between religion, family, success, and politics are replaced with Dr. Phil-ish platitudes about YOU. Any discussion of “I” is characterized by the obnoxiousness that had previously existed only in exaggerated caricatures of Kanye. The music reflects this. Viz. the musical backdrop, alexmacpherson noted that Kanye:

“is the first proper big hip-hop act (who's come up via the trad hip-hop route, unlike eg MIA) to treat other genres in an indie kind of way though - ie whereas hip-hop traditionally subsumes other genres into itself and makes them wholly hip-hop, as opposed to rock or bhangra or whatever, Kanye's all about trying to dress up in their clothes, trying to be them except not too much.”

The pre-release mixtape Can’t Tell Me Nothing looped Peter Bjorn & John’s ‘Young Folks’ and turned the whistling into not just a hook, but the melody of the whole song. ‘Stronger’ doesn’t incorporate a sample of Daft Punk and transform it. It rides the sample for the whole song and turns rap into French house, pulling the opposite trick that Jay does in Big Pimpin’ or Hard Knock Life. Dizzee’s opening salvo on Maths + English might be “there’s a world outside of the ghetto and I want you to see it,” but Kanye doesn’t bother stating it, but instead just kidnaps you and takes you there. I’d argue that this impulse might be “indie” but is also very pop. Nonethelesss, he loses something in the process. The entire album is built for world conquering. Swathed in synths and designed to be played in stadiums, songs off Graduation are initially as subtle as being hit in the head with a brick, or drinking a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. The best example of the result is Homecoming. Home, the earlier version of Homecoming with John Legend (from College Dropout era mixtapes), rides a bittersweet soul sample mourning fallen comrades that’s ambivalent about Kanye having left his community to pursue his dreams, begging “never leave me alone…I’ll be coming home.” Two albums later, the song has become Kanye’s triumphant return to a Windy (Wendy) City that hasn’t always appreciated his greatness (should he even show up to this fake shit?). This generalism and self-caricaturisation might seem grotesque to those of us who fell for the aw-shucks self-deprecating Kanye of the first album, but the transmutation is a necessary bit of alchemy that morphs Kanye into a pop star. Or at least tries to.

Kanye wants absolute respect, but also love. To be an undeniable fact of pop life, unassailable from critics, haters, or fans. The problem is, no matter how successful he is, he can’t quite shake his eagerness to please, and his fear that he hasn’t. I’m not sure if this makes him a better pop star, or if the hollowness behind the “Fuck you!” prevents him from becoming one, but it certainly makes him a more interesting larger-than-life figure. With the detailed introspection and intelligence removed from his lyrics in pursuit of broad-based relatability, Kanye’s insecurities have taken over his public persona. The last fifteen minutes of the Montreal concert were dedicated to a rant about a bad review an earlier concert got from a music magazine.

Kanye’s response? “FUCK YOU! You think you can review something without emotion, when I made it with emotion? This isn’t a term paper. I made this with emotion and you can’t tell me it’s not perfect!” Pleading with the audience to reaffirm his value, stressing that “artists have feelings,” even when they’re successful. Made with emotion. Miles from Jay’s response, which posits his work as addressing concerns of the ghetto and its inhabitants, pretending to make no claims to Kanye’s ambition, declaring himself indifferent to critical response: “how you rate music that thugs with nothing relate to it / I help them see their way through it / not you.” Jay’s “Fuck a critic” is punk, pushing away his pop audience, and simultaneously drawing them in, all the more attractive because he doesn’t need them. Pharoahe Monch “sold wood in the hood” while “you sold platinum ‘round the world…but when [he’s] in the street, then shit is all good.” Broad-based popular acceptance is not only absent, but less important than the respect of the hip-hop community. And if popular acceptance and success leads to critical derision, well, as Jay says:

Rap critics they say he's "Money Cash Hoes"
I'm from the hood stupid, what type of facts are those
If you grew up with holes in ya zapatos
You'd be celebrating the minute you was havin' dough

Jay’s aspirational. Success is money and money is success. If critics don’t like it, at the very least they can’t knock the hustle.

But Kanye wants to be a pop star AND a rock star AND a rap star AND a hipster. He wants everyone to know his songs, but he wants them to fuck off, but he can’t tell them to fuck off because they need to love him. He wants love from Pitchfork and hangs with Kid Sister and listens to Young Folks. His favourite part of the Grammies is taking pictures with Feist (!) and posting them on his blog. He wants respect from the hip-hop community, significant portions of which still see him as a mediocre rapper. He wants critical acclaim and acknowledgement of his genius; he craves it. But he also wants to tell them to fuck off so they can love him. The problem is he can’t make up his mind. So Kanye’s critical fuck off comes off as an overachieving teacher’s pet begging for a cookie. (I’m halfway through Real Punks and koganbot might say that I hate this about him because it reminds me of myself, and he’d probably be right.) Nonetheless, his desperation is ridiculous and unnecessary. How much did we pay for even the worst seats in the house? Yeah. I thought so. How much are you making every night of this tour? Thought so. How many people are here cheering for you? Exactly. And you want my pity? You can call him crazy, but as you’ll learn from the free Kanye-penned self-help book handed out after the show, “crazy is a label that the average put on the exceptional.” Exactly.

This was supposed to try and figure out if Kanye was a pop star or not, but it kind of got away from me. If rock stars like Mick and Britney and Iggy don’t give a shit, how do pop stars relate to their audiences? Does Kanye fit the template? If not, what is he?

Also for your reading pleasure, platitudes from Kanye West Presents: Thank You and You're Welcome:

Know Your Worth

Get Used to Getting Used (to "mis" "over" or "ab" use someone is negative. to use if necessary and if you can't be used you're useless)

If Everybody Thinks It's Right...You're Doing Something Wrong!

Believe in your FLYNESS...conquer your shyness

Sometimes when I see a bad performance and people still clap I wonder if they're clapping because they liked what they saw or because they're happy it's over?

When I see people with messed-up teeth, I want to be that one person who tells them the truth like the kids told me, "Your teeth are big and white like a horse!"

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

This is good stuff! More please!

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

yes, hurray :)

[koganbot]

Ditto.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah this is terrific!

I'd argue that Kanye's conflict is fundamentally one between two ways of being aspirational: the one in which he was raised, which focuses on hard work, hard graft, education and knowledge, and also crucially the importance of pleasing other people in order to get where you want to go; and the one in which his hip-hop peers were mostly raised, which sidesteps all those traditional paths up in favour of the hustle, focusing on money first and foremost, which doesn't give a fuck about pleasing people. Obviously class is a huge factor here - from his style to his lyrics to his language, Kanye's always been solidly middle class. And the middle classes have always been the people most concerned with being perceived as socially respectable - transpose this to the music/entertainment world, and that's what Kanye wants. To be respected by everyone.

Kanye wants absolute respect, but also love. To be an undeniable fact of pop life, unassailable from critics, haters, or fans.

This reminds me of that early Madonna quote, about how her sole aim was to be loved by everyone in the world. Kanye and Madonna's need to be loved makes them contort and twist themselves into all sorts of shapes purely for our pleasure - and their talent/nous ensures that they never seem pathetically needy. But people like Beyoncé expect to be loved. The idea that anyone could not love them is completely alien. When I interviewed Ciara last year, her confidence and poise were so overwhelming that I asked her if she'd ever known a moment's doubt, and she actually looked at me as if she had no idea what the concept of doubt even was. I suspect if I asked Kanye that, he'd start spluttering and ranting and denying it, ie obviously he is RIVEN with self-doubt.

Which is why I love Kanye's ego tbh - cuz it's so obviously based in his insecurity, the shifting sands of where he stands in relation to his multiple audiences. Also, the most grating examples of it aren't on record, and I can switch myself off to them.

[weasel-seeker.livejournal.com]

Right. So I guess my crucial question is what does that make Kanye?

In our discussions of pop stars and the trump things, etc. we seem to identify the poise and expectation of being loved as being a fundamental (or important) pop star characteristic (or is that a rock star one?). Kanye himself has kind of moved himself outside the box of hip hop star, but I'm not sure if a proper pop star is allowed to be this needy (and I'd disagree about pathetic - if you'd heard that rant, you would have been cringing. i mean, most of the audience were cheering for him, but it sounded like an insecure girlfriend/boyfriend who constantly needs to ask you "do you love me? really? no....really?"). Maybe Justin, but Justin's neediness manifests itself in his songs and not really anywhere else.

In retrospect the pop star-ness probably has more to do with the shift in context/content/sound than his personality, but I still think that should have something to do with it. The lonely giant thing is so alien to rap that it really sticks out. Hell, even Eminem had D12.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

The most needy pop stars are past-it pop stars! I'm thinking Geri Halliwell, Robbie Williams et al here, though maybe I'm being harsh cuz I kind of hated them in the first place. And Kanye definitely isn't past it; Graduation is easily my least favourite of his albums but the best stuff on it is as interesting and addictive as before.

It's amazing how quickly Kanye's become a star (of whatever sort); it was only a few years ago he was just some back room hip-hop producer. I think that accelerated star-making process is kind of important here but I'm too tired to really think about why.

[koganbot]

Mick Jagger in his prime, 1964-1965. Sounded totally needy and totally not needy at the same time! What do you think "Satisfaction" and "Heart Of Stone" are about?

(Lex, someday I will get you to appreciate the Rolling Stones. Not as icons but as a band whose old stuff is still potent and problematic and whose problems live in the present.)

[weasel-seeker.livejournal.com]

I think Lex is talking about popstars who are needy (wrt audience, success, fame), not artists who convey neediness within their songs. Even when Jagger's singing needy/not needy, he's still Mick Jagger, strutting and rocking and telling his audience to fuck off, no?

[koganbot]

And writing songs that imply that strutters and rockers are phonies and psychos! He sounded needy on "Back Street Girl." And the lyrics claimed that the narrator wasn't needy. Shifting images, always.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think Kanye is pathetic, and that he kind of sounds pathetic when he's rapping -- he can't match the confidence in his words to his restrained, kind of perfunctory voice.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

girlboymusic called Britney's "rock star" status early while we were looking for someone else (Britney didn't have any new music out at that point in '07). It had something to do with giving up all pretense of ever compromising with anyone (about anything). So Kanye might actually be an anti-rock-star, in that he only compromises. I've always found him to be weirdly...er, compromised myself, like I'm listening to the Wizard of Oz and only seeing the guy behind the curtain instead. And I don't really care, but it does mean that I don't feel very passionately about him. (He's too cerebral, and he seems to have 0 heart or guts. Which I guess makes him the post-gift Scarecrow, too.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, no, he's not an "anti" rock star, he's just not much of a rock star. He's more like an accountant who somehow became a crime boss because everyone above him was killed.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Uh, y'know, a crime boss's accountant.

[weasel-seeker.livejournal.com]

No heart or guts? I mean, I guess I'd agree with you now, which is why his newer stuff doesn't click with me, but The College Dropout has some sublime moments of heart and occasional guts, which I think I touched on vaguely.

I'd agree that over the course of his career he's lost those, but I'm not sure if I'd ever have characterised him as cerebral. What do you mean by that? And by 0 heart or guts? (I guess, who exemplifies having those for you? Not a defense, a legitimate question.) Kweli and Mos and the Roots might be cerebral (backpack, conscious) while still having guts, but Kanye's 'thinker' status has diminished along with his everything else. It's like his humanity's burned off over the course of his career, leaving nothing but pure ego and neediness.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure really -- I think whatever "heart" his music had around the time of "College Dropout" has (maybe) diminished, but I guess I'm thinking in big pictures here, in a Pop Trumps sort of way. I guess I mean there's something very calculated about the construction of his image, in a literal way -- like he's been planning just about everything (overthinking it, maybe?).

So I think that by Graduation, he's not even going for hearts and guts, but I think there's something cerebral, or "about ____" instead of "____" about his own "hearts and guts" even when they're trying to be those -- started listening to "Through the Wire" for the first time in a while a few weeks ago and still really love it, probably my favorite Kanye song, but (esp. watching the video) it seems almost like he'd had his meta stuff (big picture) overwhelming the impact of his content even then -- "This Is the Song I Wrote About My Jaw Being Wired Shut After a Car Accident." And it's still the one I have the strongest visceral reaction to myself.

Maybe another way of using what I'm calling "cerebral" is "clever," which I don't dislike in principle (Skye Sweetnam is almost all "clever"), but can often (but not necessarily) put me at a distance. (Busdriver is a rapper who's pretty much all "clever," 100% brain, but I like him more than Kanye because he doesn't want anyone to think he aspires to anything else.) (And I guess Kanye, by aspiring to heart and guts, might seem to have them for some people, or most people; I just think when he does heartfelt or gutfelt he sounds kind of...not dishonest, but inadequate, maybe.)

Don't see how he's any less of a thinker now -- I think he's got more pure-brain in Graduation, more figuring out an angle. Maybe that's just what my brain says when I see someone consciously reaching out to hipsters, I dunno. (And anyway, it's not actually any smarter than some of the stuff on his first alb -- I don't know the second album nearly as well though tbh.)

[weasel-seeker.livejournal.com]

My fault for confusing smart, clever and brain/thinking/cerebral.

Don't Be a Pri...Madonna.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

OR ELSE: He is a reluctant prima donna, which I guess makes him an understudy. I wouldn't categorize Madonna this way at all, but I also don't put Kanye and Madonna in the same league, even if they share a sensibility or something.

[oddnumbereven.livejournal.com]

He passes one gold standard of pop stardom - my mum knows who he is.

[koganbot]

This is off the topic of Kanye, whom I'm massively ignorant about.

whereas hip-hop traditionally subsumes other genres into itself and makes them wholly hip-hop, as opposed to rock or bhangra or whatever

Well, there are a couple of tracks (both from bhangra) that I'd argue are exceptions: Panjabi MC's "Beware Of The Boys," which was "Mundian To Bach Ke" with Jay-Z added, which transformed the song, and Truth Hurts' "Addictive," both of which seemed not quite to belong to hip-hop but not quite to belong to anything else. Other counterexamples? Interestingly, I'd say that something like OutKast's "Hey Ya" is subsumed by hip-hop, even though it was a pop breakout crossover - as if to say, "If we do it it's hip-hop, and it doesn't even have to sound like hip-hop to be hip-hop." I'd say that in its time the first Beasties album (which I think is tremendous) subsumed everything into hip-hop, and only since then has it been removed from hip-hop. (That's too simplistic an analysis, though.) If only Cowboy Troy were better, he'd be an interesting problem. David Banner's "Cadillac On 22s" seems to occupy its own universe and enough of us voted for it in the Nashville Scene's country critics ballot that it made the bottom of the list! And Bubba Sparxxx had a moment where he seemed to be creating something new, though hip-hop was accepting it and country wasn't. But these exceptions - if they are exceptions - aren't enough to counter Lex's generally strong contention.

OK, but you know where your statement becomes problematic, Lex: REGGAE and R&B!!! When hip-hop runs into them you can't readily tell who's subsumed from who's doing the subsuming.

I don't have time to elaborate right now, but "What's Luv?" is a prime example on the hip-hop/r&b side. And though Billboard has a hip-hop chart it also has a more crucial hip-hop/r&b chart.

[koganbot]

Have to leave five minutes ago, but of course there are many different ways of being a pop star. Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood are pop stars. When I was a young man, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt were pop stars.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about what makes someone a pop star, of course.

[weasel-seeker.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should be distinguishing between pop star and um...icon's not the right word either, but maybe it's more descriptive of what Kanye is shooting for. The key for me is he's not simply transfering genre but making some kind of an attempt to transcend genre, and I suppose in this case when I've been saying "pop" I don't just mean the pop charts or songs your mother knows (although that might be closer) but instead POP the all-encompassing cultural behemoth. Or something.

The key attribute of how Kanye seems to see pop stardom and thus how I've been reading it is "the biggest star in the universe". An undeniable fact. A singularity in the pop universe. A force of gravity that pulls in all aspects of pop music while remaining itself. Does that make Kanye a musical black hole? Don't know. Leaving this idea undeveloped to both piss you off and to get some food.