Rank the Best Kanye Singles...

[Lament]

Fair enough. At least you gave it a spin. I can respect that, sir.

[nyquillyn]

I gave it a try and I guess it is safe to say I just don't get it. I did hear some interesting sounds, but not there for me
.

Did you try "808s & Heartbreak"?

You and I seem to have fairly similar tastes. "808s" was my gateway drug to Kanye.

[Yeddie Yedder]

I gave it a try and I guess it is safe to say I just don't get it. I did hear some interesting sounds, but not there for me
.

Did you try "808s & Heartbreak"?

You and I seem to have fairly similar tastes. "808s" was my gateway drug to Kanye.

I don't think so..will go back and listen.

[zeb]

Listening to Yeezus right now and there's just no way I can rank any other music above this. It's immortal. It's perfect.

Let's revisit this in ten years.

[LoathedVermin72]

Listening to Yeezus right now and there's just no way I can rank any other music above this. It's immortal. It's perfect.

Let's revisit this in ten years.

Yes, let's.

[Jorge]

'Yes.

[Kaius]

e'Y.s

[zeb]

Contractions are so much fun.

[Lament]

In terms of stretches where an artist managed to garner both commercial superstardom and worldwide critical acclaim, how many artists have had a period like Kanye over the last twelve years?

Bowie from the end of the sixties to the beginning of the eighties, Stevie Wonder in the seventies, and Prince in the eighties are the three most obvious examples. Stevie's critical reign wasn't at long, but he probably burned the brightest at his peak. Prince's critical acclaim predated his commercial prowess by a bit, and when his commercial prowess waned, he got it back at the price of the critical acclaim he always enjoyed.

Neil McCormick (one of the most prominent critics of the past thirty-five years and the author of Killing Bono) seems to think Bowie is the closest thing we've seen to what Kanye is...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/musi ... Bowie.html

Some critics have questioned West’s sanity, and his pitched mood swings certainly seem to suggest some level of mania. West, typically, sees it differently: “I sit back and see s--- and think ’Am I the only one that’s not crazy?” But since when did we want our pop stars well-balanced? If West reminds me of anyone, it is David Bowie in the Seventies, a decade when Bowie went from impersonating an alien to giving fascist salutes whilst producing an astonishing body of work that sent ripples far beyond his own actually rather limited commercial appeal. Decades on, we celebrate Bowie’s visionary achievements at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I suspect that is exactly the kind of place West would envisage being displayed. So perhaps it is time to show the world’s zaniest, most controversial and ground breaking pop star a little respect.

[LoathedVermin72]

What about Michael Jackson?

[Kevin Davis]

That article was a great read -- Neil McCormack is a great writer (and "Killing Bono" is a fantastic book).

In the past twelve years, I don't think there has been any artist whose specific career circumstances have really been comparable to Kanye's. Taylor Swift may be on the path -- her first three albums (much like Kanye's) essentially saw her stretching and refining what could be considered her "default" style until she was satisfied with it, and while her break from this default style wasn't as abrupt ("Red" was the transitional album that Kanye never had after "Graduation"), "1989" and "808's" chart similar plot points on each artist's respective graph, and Swift has said in interviews that she envisions her next album being something entirely different still. Critical reception to her work has become increasingly favorable as she has deviated further from Nashville norms and her willingness to assert her own vision has become clearer. Obviously her public behavior lacks Kanye's tendency toward contentiousness (if not toward general drama), and her music isn't inherently as groundbreaking as Kanye's, but depending on how she moves forward artistically, there is definitely a chance that her career 5-10 years from now might appear much the same way -- and there are certainly enough eyes on her for it to register on a large scale.

But to me, there is a distinction between what artists like Kanye and Bowie (and Swift, I guess) do and "reinvention." What these artists do is adopt a new style, a new sound, a new look, etc., and commit to it for one album, one tour at a time, and then move onto the next thing. This is not the same as what Tom Waits did with "Swordfishtrombones," or what U2 did with "Achtung Baby," or what Miles Davis did with "Bitches' Brew" -- these were seismic and long-term if not permanent shifts, completely changing the nature of what those artists meant relative to their concurrent culture in lasting terms (Waits and Miles at least literally never went back to the artists they were before the changes). And while I am no Bowie aficionado (though I do like him), all of Kanye's albums feel like magnifications of individual facets of the same literal self he introduced more or less in totality on "The College Dropout," even when the environment changes.

Ultimately, I think this sets him up to have a more diverse, more compelling one-album-at-a-time body of work than someone like Waits or Miles, especially at this stage; love them though I do (far more than I love Kanye in the end), I concede that, to non-enthusiasts, a lot of their albums probably sound the same. But Kanye's is a less sustainable model. I think Kanye will continue to produce compelling music; his raw talent level is too advanced to assume otherwise. But I predict that -- sooner rather than later, perhaps -- he will reach a threshold that will mark a clear dividing line between his vital works and his "legacy" albums, in a way that you don't necessarily see with artists like Waits or Miles. That certainly seems to have happened with Bowie, whose late-period albums are generally met with the same kind of respect typically given to rock's elders, but rarely register on a level that suggest he has added something critical to his own story.

For my own preferences, I have been discouraged by the degree to which the auto-tune device has resurfaced in Kanye's work post-"808's" -- not because I fundamentally object to it, but because I feel like Kanye has overestimated its effectiveness as a creative tool. The sung passages on "Yeezus" were the first time in Kanye's career where I thought, "You know, this was more exciting to me the first time around." My fingers are crossed that this doesn't become the norm on future records -- it has been too exciting watching him move forward.

[LoathedVermin72]

But to me, there is a distinction between what artists like Kanye and Bowie (and Swift, I guess) do and "reinvention." What these artists do is adopt a new style, a new sound, a new look, etc., and commit to it for one album, one tour at a time, and then move onto the next thing. This is not the same as what Tom Waits did with "Swordfishtrombones," or what U2 did with "Achtung Baby," or what Miles Davis did with "Bitches' Brew" -- these were seismic and long-term if not permanent shifts, completely changing the nature of what those artists meant relative to their concurrent culture in lasting terms (Waits and Miles at least literally never went back to the artists they were before the changes). And while I am no Bowie aficionado (though I do like him), all of Kanye's albums feel like magnifications of individual facets of the same literal self he introduced more or less in totality on "The College Dropout," even when the environment changes.

I do not agree with this. If one listens/looks closely, I don't think Kanye has simply adopted a new style with each album and moved on; each album is a logical progression from the last both sonically and thematically/ideologically, and I think - each time - there has been no going back to the previous incarnation of Kanye. 808s and Yeezus certainly feel like "seismic shifts" to me. After 808s, there was no way we would ever hear the Kanye of "Spaceship" or "Gold Digger" again. After Yeezus, there's no going back to the Kanye of "Amazing". Yet, at the same time, all the territory Kanye has explored on each album has been evident in the next. While Yeezus is a huge change in sound and tone from his previous work, you can still hear the impeccable orchestration of MBDTF come through in subtle ways (the sun of "he'll give us what we need" peaking through the clouds of "On Sight", the drum-roll transition to the rousing finale of "New Slaves").

For my own preferences, I have been discouraged by the degree to which the auto-tune device has resurfaced in Kanye's work post-"808's" -- not because I fundamentally object to it, but because I feel like Kanye has overestimated its effectiveness as a creative tool. The sung passages on "Yeezus" were the first time in Kanye's career where I thought, "You know, this was more exciting to me the first time around."

You started off admitting it, but this is totally subjective, and I don't agree at all - as you know, Yeezus, for me, is by far his most thrilling and significant accomplishment, and his usage of autotune was better than ever - it's an integral part of that album's architecture (which is very dense). If anything, I think its creative effectiveness has increased massively since 808s, which - though I still enjoy it - relied upon it too heavily and consistently to become as musically compelling as the albums that came after it.

[Kevin Davis]

Relying heavily upon auto-tune was the whole point of " 808's" -- I always understood the album to be Kanye's way of legitimizing what was commonly perceived to be a cop-out device, not only by using it in the first place, but by using it to craft an album that was the complete opposite of the non-human processed plasticism that auto-tune supposedly embodied. Using it more sparingly would have interfered with what I've always taken to be the mission of the album.

Curiously, did you hear "Yeezus" first? That might help explain the difference in our takes on the matter.

[evenslow]

What about Michael Jackson?

I would argue he created only two real game-changers (Off the Wall and Thriller) so it's not as long of a critical/commercial run as the others Lament mentioned. However, those two were so seismic he should probably be included in the discussion.

[LoathedVermin72]

Relying heavily upon auto-tune was the whole point of " 808's" -- I always understood the album to be Kanye's way of legitimizing what was commonly perceived to be a cop-out device, not only by using it in the first place, but by using it to craft an album that was the complete opposite of the non-human processed plasticism that auto-tune supposedly embodied. Using it more sparingly would have interfered with what I've always taken to be the mission statement of the album.

Curiously, did you hear "Yeezus" first? That might help explain the difference in our takes on the matter.

Oh, I understand that and completely agree with you. I think it's successful and compelling on that album - just not as successful or compelling as it would later become. The reliance is important, but ultimately, it makes the album less than his other work. Sonically and thematically, it's much less ambitious than what came after it, and arguably even some of what came before it. But, again, I still like it and am not arguing that he doesn't accomplish what he set out to achieve.

No, I actually listened to the albums chronologically: I started with The College Dropout and went forward from there.

[Kevin Davis]

Right on. And for what it's worth, my comments were really a reaction to the article's comparison of Kanye to Bowie, and Lament's comment earlier about "constant tearing down and reinvention." I agree that not every one of his albums has been a total about-face (his first three, like I said, were basically an exercise in refinement). But I think a couple have, and I think the ones that have fit the bill more than you concede, and I bet we see a few more of them. It's tough to look at an artist right in the thick of his creative growth and compare him to artists whose books have more or less been written, because the analogies are never perfect. But that's how Kanye feels to me at this moment in time.

[Kevin Davis]

http://m.pitchfork.com/news/60935-kanye ... d-at-vmas/

[verb_to_trust]

Where is his new album? 2016?

[Kevin Davis]

Where is his new album? 2016?

On an unknown day, at an unknown hour, is when he shall return...

[digster]

This thread's really interesting for me; it seems most folks here, and to be honest, most friends who are Kanye fans, see him as an album artist as opposed to a singles guy. I think I'm, in some respects, the opposite. His albums have always struck me as being fairly spotty, but when he lands on something, it's as good as it gets. I think about songs like Power or Black Skinhead, songs that, for me, so expertly encapsulate everything that's good about those albums and what he seems to be going for, and the albums as a whole tend to achieve that more infrequently. I'm curious if others feel that way, cause Kanye's definitely viewed as an album guy.