The Wit And Wisdom of Kanye West

[Dalty]

Revisited from the "Other" place.

I see he has excelled himself this time by refusing to shout angrily into a microphone in vaguely rhyming words until somebody proved they were disabled, like the onus was on them.

[Space Tycoon]

Do you not like this guy or something? I'm getting a vibe here...

[Mal Shot First]

It's been established, after all, that Dalty is a big ol' racist.

[Dalty]

If thinking Kanye West is a fucking tool is racist, then there are a whole lotta racists everywhere.

[Dalty]

More genius, but this time from his fans. Apparently they are all over Twitter asking "who the fuck is this Paul McCartney guy?" on Kanye's new track and saying his career will now take off thanks to West.

[Space Tycoon]

Cool! He should work with Phil Collins next.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

McCartney or Kanye?

[Fake Strider]

Why not both?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Just listened to it. Didn't care much for it. There aren't many McCartney vocals in it at all (not that this would have made it better; McCartney misses way more than he hits these days), and every single line Kanye sings is autotuned in a way that is distracting and unpleasant.

Was McCartney on keys or something? If not, there's really not much of him in the song. I'm not sure how much of it he wrote. I guess he has a greater vocal presence in it than Janelle Monáe has in Fun's "We Are Young," but at least she gets a tiny little section to herself. Most of the time, Kanye's either singing over the McCartney vocals or singing with them. I had to strain to hear any Macca.

Maybe I heard the wrong version of the song. I dunno. I know there are already a handful of remixes. It's possible I listened to one of those by mistake.

[Mal Shot First]

More genius, but this time from his fans. Apparently they are all over Twitter asking "who the fuck is this Paul McCartney guy?" on Kanye's new track and saying his career will now take off thanks to West.

At first I thought they were being sarcastic.

[Dalty]

I think some of them, later on, were.

[Dalty]

AGAIN.????

http://news.sky.com/story/1424118/kanye ... r-beck-win

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Here's this:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/b ... 015-771713

[Dalty]

That would appear to say that Beck has more class and humility in his left small toe than Yeesuz has ever had.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Did everybody see that? Dalty just complimented a scientologist.

Here's something surprising: it turns out a lot of the new guard doesn't know who Beck is. A lot of people all over the Internet (many of them angry Beyoncé fans) are asking "Who is Beck?" Well, I guess it's not really that surprising. People were asking the same question about Paul McCartney a couple months ago.

I sometimes forget that I'm no longer a spring chicken and that today's teens as far removed from the mid-nineties as teens of the mid-nineties were removed from the mid-seventies.

I feel old as shit when it suits me, sure, but it doesn't always suit me.

[Dalty]

I don't think his religion came into play here.

Is that not knowing Beck like they didn't know McCartney?

[Mal Shot First]

I'm a bit surprised that someone who won the Best Album prize is an artist whom so many people wouldn't even have heard of. I think the fans who complain are just being intentionally ignorant, pretending that the person who won is a nobody while their idol is obviously more worthy of the prize.

I also don't think it's necessarily an age difference that's preventing them from knowing who Beck is. It's not like the guy just released his first album in a decade. I think the fragmentation and isolation of musical communities and fans that occurred over the past 15 years has made it difficult to stay updated on everything that's out there. There's no reason why someone listening to Beyoncé or Kanye West would be familiar with Beck - they occupy different genres and, one might say, different worlds. How many kids' Pandora stations do you think would play both Beyoncé and Beck?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Beck might be known to the gamer/quirky movie crowd, since he did the soundtrack for Scott Pilgrim. Then again, I'm not sure how big a deal it is for this crowd to look into soundtracks and learn about the artists who perform on them. I'm not really all that sure how big a deal it was for my generation. It was a big deal for me, but that doesn't mean it was a big deal for everyone.

I'm also not sure how big an industry scores are these days. The shape of music scores has changed. Do people still feel a strong drive to go out and buy scores for movies they like? I'm sure it depends on the person and on the score in question. In general, though, are scores selling as well as they used to sell? ("Is music on the whole even selling as well as it used to sell?" you might ask. Good question. Probably wouldn't take too much digging to find out.)

[Dalty]

I listen to Beyoncé when I feel down and need to be reminded what a strong, independent woman I am and that I don't need no man to validate me.

[Adam54]

I think I've gotten more annoyed with the news coverage of ____ celebrity tweeting their annoyance with Kanye West than the general annoyance that is Kanye West himself.

Honestly, who really, truly gives a flying fuck? Really?

[Mal Shot First]

Not Beck! He really wants you to know that he's cool with Kanye. Really!

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I like a lot of Beck's stuff, and I like a lot of Beyoncé's stuff. Beyoncé and Kanye fans have been annoying, but I've been pretty annoyed with Beck fans, too, for posting things like this:









Both albums had a similar amount of critical steam behind them. Just because Beck wrote every track on the album and performed a bunch of the instruments, it doesn't instantly mean Beyoncé's album is an execrable excretion of excrement. The award is for the album, so the award goes to everyone behind it. The physical award goes to the artist(s) credited on the cover, but the Grammy is for the total package the way the Best Picture Oscar is for everyone who made the picture happen.

Did one album "deserve" to win over the other? I guess it depends on how you look at it. It also depends on personal notions of desert and whether or not the Grammys mean anything to you.

There were any number of things a person could factor in. Beyoncé was the clearer commercial success of the two. Beyoncé was also a pretty innovative release. It just appeared on iTunes one night with no advance press, along with more than a dozen videos. People didn't even know she had been working on an album. What factored in Beck's favor? For one, his album was the only rock album up for best album. The rest were pop/R&B albums, so the pop/R&B vote was split. Beck has also been releasing albums for more than two decades, has been a critical darling all along the way, and has never won a best album award. (Note: Beyoné's solo career goes back to 2003, but she had been releasing albums as part of Destiny's Child five years prior to that. She's no spring chicken herself.) Voters love giving nods late in people's careers as a kind of backdoor lifetime achievement award. It happens with the Oscars. John Wayne got one for his notoriously hammy/just OK performance in the first True Grit adaptation.

Beck's Morning Phase is a solid album. It's pretty similar in tone and approach to Beck's Sea Change. A lot of fans consider Sea Change to be the superior album. It was a huge critical success in its day--Rolling Stone named it the best album of 2002--and it's still considered a landmark album. It wasn't even nominated for best album. 2002 was the year of the Norah Jones. People still bitch about how Norah Jones's Come Away with Me (also a big critical success in its day) won that year.

Beck's win should give Beyoncé fans hope. Maybe Beyoncé will win for a lesser album in 2028.

[Dalty]

Kanye West is such a dick, Martin Luther King would make him sit at the back of the bus.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I should mention that the Beck lyrics above aren't super great or anything. It's unfortunate that those Beck lyrics, in particular, were chosen to represent his lyrical ability. Some of the above lyrics are nice, but they're nestled in among pretty bland and generic lines. It's also yet another example of Beck's absolute obsession with working the word "vagabond" into his lyrics.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Kanye apologized.