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Chicago's Kanye West produced Jay-Z, Talib Kweli and Alicia Keys and then fashioned one of the most personal concepts of the era, the soul-infected
The College Dropout (2004).
There are three main streams of music here. First and foremost, there are
lush smooth constructions:
We Don't Care, with Caribbean feeling and children's singsong,
Spaceship, which is lounge music with even a touch of Frank Zappa-esque orchestration, and Slow Jamz.
Then there are traditional rap rants but architected in creative manners:
All Falls Down, featuring funky Spanish guitar and female backup vocals,
Never Let Me Down, interwoven with girls humming Chinese melodies at an anthemic tempo,
Two Words, with a harpsichord simulating a suspense movie soundtrack and vast layered choirs,
Family Business, coupled with a jazzy piano sonata and a gospel hymn.
Finally there are short satirical skits that parody ordinary life by means of old-fashioned melodies like Graduation Day and I'll Fly Away.
Halfway between the cabaret and the rant are the military march of
Jesus Walks, replete with funereal call-and-response of both male and female voices,
and the demented dissonant pseudo-klezmer dance of The New Workout Plan (with more Frank Zappa-esque traits in the vocal interaction) that suddenly remixes itself into a techno number.
The 13-minute stream of consciousness Last Call that closes the show
is, instead, a mix blessing.
This is supremely intelligent, creative and trans-stylistic postmodernism.
Hyper-chromatic three-dimensional arrangements
(Jon Brion)
turned
Late Registration (2005) into a stately hip-hop fresco and a
distillation of the genre's existential legacy.
The fluttering mellow ballad Heard 'Em Say announces a less
eccentric storyteller, sometimes even
too atmospheric (Drive Slow) and
tender (Hey Mama). Those moments of excessive humanity are
complemented by the
more dramatic Bring Me Down (a duet with Brandy) and the more
theatrical Roses.
When the arrangements are dense enough, they add meaning and not just elegance,
like the horn noise of a swing band that permeates Touch The Sky,
the
almost tribal sound generated by Gold Digger,
the thundering Diamonds From Sierra Leone.
and the unconventional choreography of Addiction (Brazilian polyrhythm, soft vocals, digital backbeats, but actually little or no orchestration)
The most surreal number is the six-minute Gone, a funny piano-driven dance with wails of strings and a driving dialogue of voices.
On the other hand,
the verbose seven-minute We Major is another mixed blessing, just like the longest track on the previous album.
This album has neither the wit nor the pathos of the previous album.
Nonetheless, this album turned West into a superstar.
By comparison, Graduation (2007)
was largely uneventful, despite
DJ Toomp's and Mike Dean's synths.
808s & Heartbreak (2008), the musical soundtrack of an emotional meltdown, was at least an interesting experiment:
most of the time crooning
(Kid Cudi-penned songs)
instead of rapping (and through a vocoder-like device) over
spartan electronic arrangements (using a vintage drum-machine from the 1980s).
The result was Kanye West at his most both frigid and depressed, both robotic
and pathetic.
West also produced the seventh album by Chicago's rapper Common,
Finding Forever (2007), Common being often singled out as a rapper who
does not promote violence, chauvinism, etc.
The grandiose
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Roc-A-Fella, 2010), that basically
reversed the path of the previous two albums, was hailed as an epochal
masterpiece by the press but mostly because of what it represented (a diligent
adoption of all "cool" stereotypes of the time), and not necessarily because
of what it sounded like.
This overcrowded
album certainly brought together West's arrangement ambitions in a pompous
and multifaceted manner, feeling more like a Wagner symphony than a hip-hop
album.
By applying the lessons of all his masters (Jon Brion, Kid Cudi), West
came up with a better focused and integrated music/text melody/rap message
in the anthemic and dreamy chant of Dark Fantasy and in the
driving and hypnotic lament of Gorgeous.
This method achieved a new peak of pathos in Power, a terrifying variation on King Crimson's futuristic anthem 21st Century Schizoid Man.
The level of sophistication increases with the electronic effects of Hell Of A Life, in which West's vocal line mirrors a vintage Black Sabbath bass line.
The way Lost In The World transitions from a delicate litany
to a jovial dance (employing Bon Iver's very non-jovial melody Woods)
is spectacular.
At the same time West displays his knack as a director of voices, arranging
them in sequences and layers to obtain maximum dramatic effect.
Hence
All Of The Lights (boasting eleven guest vocalists), a quasi-house
number over thundering convoluted percussion, with trumpet fanfares and a
melody reminiscent of DHT's Listen To Your Heart.
Hence Monster, a parade of vocal actors (Bon Iver, Jazy-Z, Rick Ross)
culminating with a terrific machine-gun performance by Nicki Minaj
suspended in time.
The succession of vocal registers (Prince Cy Hi, Jay-Z, Pusha T, RZA, Swizz Beatz) sculpts the elegiac lulling sinister soothing So Appalled.
A polyphony of voices (notably Rick Ross) propels Devil In A New Dress
over a languid Pink Floyd-ian symphonic adagio.
The music is not only emotionally draining but physicially extenuating as
the pieces get longer and longer.
The nine-minute Runaway begins with just a ticking piano,
transitions to excruciating raps, ends with an instrumental coda of
deconstructed chamber music.
The eight-minute Blame Game disguises another incursion in chamber music
as a soulful Sting-like ballad.
The album ends with
Gil Scott-Heron preaching
Who Will Survive In America over a massive beat.
This compendium of rap and soul music of the era is
a sinister hallucination of self-destructive impulses.
Watch The Throne (2011) was a collaboration with
Jay-Z.
West's manic attention to detail is a mixed blessing: the album's sound feels
lush but also wildly artificial. Most songs exist only as sound effects (with
lame lyrics that mostly celebrate the duo's jet-set life).
There is a sequence of five songs
(Niggas in Paris,
Otis,
Gotta Have It, which is probably the standout,
New Day,
That's My Bitch) that could have been a perfect EP.
At least the lounge pop of Made in America doesn't sound like just
another sound effect.
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