on sunday afternoon, i transferred the new kanye, 808's and Heartbreak, to my ipod and headed out into the cold afternoon to buy my friend mike a bottle of maker's mark for his birthday. as i briskly strolled the streets of east harlem, the icy wind whipping my face, the first strains of the album reached my ears and i was immediately intrigued. the (very minimalist) synth line of the first track Say You Will has been in my bloodstream ever since.
of course, i had previously heard about the concepts- the common denominator of the Roland TR-808, the use of auto-tune, the album as a "response" or chronicle of kanye's very rough year, the fact that kanye "sings" the whole album... etc etc. it was hard to know what to expect, and plenty of people speculated on what this whole endeavor might sound like...
let me tell you, in my humble opinion, it sounds good...
since sunday, it has been in near constant rotation on the pod, which is typical of every previous kanye album. kanye on the brain is not easy to shake off. my first impression on the street that day, after two songs, was that this album was once again kanye being absolutely, totally, unapologetically, kanye, which i love. annoying or not, whatever. if you were to say that he isn't always exactly himself, you would be really wrong. and, if you ask me, you would just be trying too hard to hate on the yeez. which is really silly and a total waste of your time.
he's going a few different places here, subject-wise, and i think he is the most successful when he is admitting to feeling a little lost. there is a vulnerability there that totally appeals to me, and i think it manages to stay on the sweet side of vulnerable, without slipping into the ridiculous. it's funny, but i thought of jenny lewis a few times, actually... jenny lewis when she turns the sarcasm down a little bit. on rilo kiley's first couple of albums there was a lot of vulnerability, in her lyric, and i hear something similar here. a plea for help, in that ever elusive pursuit of "direction"...
i hear that on Street Lights. there is just something really honestly sweet in his delivery of "see, i know my destination, but i'm just not there..." it's a great example, because out of context, sitting there written out on my blog, those words seem like they could have been penned by a melodramatic teenage girl on the pages of her unicorn-emblazoned journal. but he pulls it off! i don't know how, but he does. kanye manages to put a phat enough sound behind teen-angst caliber pleas to make me totally buy it! normally, you can't pull that kind of shit off unless you are a pasty white dude from england writing songs in the early to mid-eighties, but as i live and breathe, here is kanye west...
as for the other tracks... my favorite song, besides Street Lights is Say You Will which i think is the real masterpiece of the album (at least that's what i think right now) and the similarly new-ordery-erasure-esque Paranoid that's another attractive aspect of this album... the highly stylized, all electronic production is so right on. As per usual for Kanye. CW found it detrimentally retro(retro is a pejorative to him) but i find it deliciously reminicent of these fave bands from my youth. and the yeezle isn't even emulating them, persay, as much as he is extracting a bit of their essence and infusing it into something that is very much his own.
i heart 808's and Heartbreaks, yo. big time. the only missteps are RoboCop, which i wouldn't even bother listening to, although maybe i haven't given it enough time yet. i will refrain from condemning it all together for a bit. the other problem is the live track at the end. maybe it's a great song, but i will never know because you can barely hear it. it sounds like it was recorded from the taper-section at a phish concert. having audience noise as the primary layer on a new album track is a mistake, dude. if it was a classic we all knew already, maybe it would work better. however, the standouts on this album make these issues pretty much moot in my mind.
xo kanye. well done.
Listen!
06. Kanye West - Street Lights
Say You Will
No comments:
Post a Comment