Love him or hate him, Kanye West is simply the most interesting thing happening in pop music right now and before his style-shifting new album 808s and Heartbreaks could even drop it's been something to both anticipate and argue about. Not to add to the glut, but let me add to the glut.
I guess at some point I started looking to Kanye to become what Bjork was in the mid to late '90s, the avant garde Manchurian Candidate - an artist sneaking into the mainstream to thwart it from within with bombs of futurism and audacity. It's not an even comparison; Kanye is much more of a high-stakes player and his worst record sales probably dwarf Bjork's best. And Bjork was far more perplexing at her MTV-friendly peek. There was little to no context for her clothes, haircuts, artwork, videos and mannerisms, to say nothing of her sounds: a strangely workable mix of the machine-hollow cold and blood-pumping warm. Post matched left-of-center dance production with pop songs in a pre-Timbaland world and Homogenic was practically just string quartets and beats under Bjork's techno hippy couplets and elf scatting. She seemed like somebody from an alternate version of our world, whereas Kanye is so nostalgic and given to fad that he is more a lucid reflection of our past and present. Almost everything he is about right now - auto-tune r'n'b, Tron retro, tribal minimalism - has a reference point somewhere else nearby in the modern conciousness.
So what makes Kanye so fascinating to me? Why do I believe he is a key to the what-next? The answer is the way he has brought immediacy back to pop star-ing. Like a hip hop John Lennon, Kanye, for all his musical genius, is a communicator first and a musician second. He's got that Beatle's impatience with the way things are done in the limelight, as well as his excess of energy. He might lack Lennon's reflective nature - there is an inane quality to a lot of Kanye's public statements - but he is a bona fide game-changer. In culture the snake tends to eat the tail and Kanye is the Internet, which used to follow the art, coming full circle to birth new thinking about what music can be used for. He's the first artist of his profile to be truly operating at the speed of blog. There was no better example of this than the success story behind "Love Lockdown." In one of my more psyched blogs, I documented this new trajectory for pop singles: Kanye peformed the song for all the world to see at the VMAs, only weeks after writing and recording it for his forthcoming album. Days after the performance he streamed his unmastered version on his blog, caught some negative feedback from fans, went back into the studio to retool the recording, then dropped the thing on iTunes, where it went to number one within 48 hours. Back in more golden days, an artist like Al Green could have rushed a new single out to radio immediately after cutting it. But they could never have been this interactive - the mediums for it didn't exist.
While I have hope that Kanye can one day take music into some second territories, for now I'm happy to enjoy 808s and Heartbreaks for what it is, a pop experiment about real-time. To put it in context you don't have to look any further than the man's blog, a never-ending stream of cold-surfaced furniture, Bladerunner couture, James Bond gadgets and poached web culture. Kanye's mother dying this year seems to have erupted a torrent of nostalgia in him that goes beyond simple irony to the level of psychic comfort food. Listening to 808s you can practically see him wrapping himself in a memory blanket of the day glo '80s. Knight Rider cars, Akira colors, low-res midi keyboard patches, all sung through an android's vocal box and punctuated with bleeps and laser blasts. Again, seen it, but Kanye has taken the personal loss of his mother and the breakup with his fiance and used them to power these retro elements with a sincerity and emotionalism that's been missing in their re-use.
If Kanye's blog is a real-time document of creative inspiration, 808s is the logical result of that. He's stayed true to his turn-ons. The structures of these new arrangements are as spare and function-first as any of the modernist architecture he's been geeking out on. "Say You Will" has more movement than it should - pick apart the beat programming and you'll see that there's nothing in there subdiving the crushed tom tom groove the way a high hat usually would, and yet it bounces along, buoyed more by the space he leaves for your mind to connect the dots. That's Kanye giving a masters class on minimalism. And so it goes for most of the record, with that restraint paying off more than not. (Although less is not always more - there is still something uncooked about the studio version of "Love Lockdown" and I'm not sure even the gorgeous "Say You Will" deserves it's 6:18 running time.)
Let's talk about the auto-tune. There are good reason to hate on it. 1) it takes Kanye out of the role of trendsetter and puts him in the company of some real tacky shit. But we shouldn't hold Kanye responsible for T-Pain's sins. Pop robot vocals have a distinguished lineage that includes Daft Punk, Air and Kraftwerk. Kanye might not be the first person to bring it to black music but he might be the first person to do it with any class. 2) it's fair to say you probably shouldn't base an entire record on a single vocal effect. I thought the Strokes made that point once and for all when their singer used the same filtered mic sound for three straight albums - it freed Casablancas to be a more energetic vocalist, but it made every song start to sound the same.
Is auto-tune a crutch for Kanye? Of course. But I prefer to think of it as a boost, a way that Kanye can play against his limitations to expand what he's capable of. It would be a shame if the auto-tune abuse obscured the bigger picture here, which is that Kanye, not content to be a restlessly inventive rapper and producer, has set his sights on soulsinging. If an auto-tune plugin gave him the cover fire he needed to get from hook-crafter to songwriter and crooner, I'm glad for it. Kanye's melodies have the deepness and he sings them like he owns them. We're not talking played-out Top 40 tunes, but old-world soulful dirges. "Street Lights" and "Bad News" feel like Pharrell producing Gershwin and "Love Lockdown" and "Coldest Winter" have the swamp and sweat of old slave spirituals that Nina Simone used to reinvent. "Welcome to Heartbreak," "Amazing" and "RoboCop" are just insanely catchy. I'm not saying he should abandon rapping, he's one of the few who can hold my attention. I'm just saying, maybe his feelings ran out of room in the rap form. Or maybe there are things that can only be said in song.
Kanye West - "Welcome to Heartbreak (Ft. Kid Cudi)"
Kanye West - "RoboCob"
Kanye West - "Say You Will"
Kanye West - "Street Lights"
Kanye West - "Bad News"
