“Paranoid” is a moment of relative levity in the middle of an otherwise down-hearted and bitter set of songs, and though it touches on the running theme of romantic distress and dissolution, its tone is more easygoing, conciliatory, and self-assured than its neighboring tracks. This comes across in the tones of keyboards and drum machines, but also in the way West’s largely rapped vocals slip casually in and out of autotune flourishes, and sit comfortably alongside some rather stunning R&B backing vocals on the chorus. The song gives off the aura of supreme confidence and style familiar from West’s previous records, but it does not contradict the sadness and confusion at its heart, or avoid the compelling yet occasionally appalling self-absorbed pettiness that comes through in nearly all of the record’s tracks.”
—Matthew Fluxblog on the new Kanye West. The autotune seemed for a while like it would be an overwhelming distraction, but some really good criticism is starting to come out of this record. Even if 808s puts you off in the end, it’s provoking an interesting conversation.
November 2008
13 posts
Are We Human?
Up late, caught Kanye on Letterman, then the Killers on Jimmy Kimmel.
Last night, at the American Music Awards, one of Kanye’s acceptance speeches was a mumbled something or other about wanting more ambition from pop stars, and pushing himself to fill an Elvis-type role in pop. He’s definitely got the ambition thing down, but the delivery is his big question mark. We know from his blog that he’s into design, and his collaborations show a range of curiosity and taste, but the dude might just be too human to ever make girls scream until they faint. Tonight on Letterman, he played Love Lockdown surrounded by masked guys playing a dozen taiko drums, and the sonic effect was menacingly clattery. Impressive. But he had no idea what to do with himself on that little stage, and mostly just rocked forward and back, smiling awkwardly, bending at the waist when he pushed his voice hard enough to make the distortion on that auto-tone filter really peak.
He can make it work when he stretches the scale. At the VMAs in September, Kanye closed the show with the same song, only he was alone on a huge stage, wearing a fitted gray suit with a small flashing heart over his left breast. The landscape and ridiculous costume brought out the theatrical ache in the song; in this context, the auto-tune made sense. Here was a guy, a celebrity at the height of his popularity and powers, leading an army of drums and yet so hurt and lonely and falling apart that he’s coats his voice in the most un-feeling, robotic noise possible. Up close, the cracks in the facade make Kanye compelling on a certain level, but they’re going to make it tough for him to bust through that swirl of contradictions and rise to icon status.
Brandon Flowers chases icon status as much as Kanye does, but in performance he’s like a robot trying to come off as a real boy. He’s stiff, he never blinks and he only looks comfortable from behind his keyboard. Flowers has a voice like balsa wood, dry and brittle, able to bend slightly but constantly threatening to break. Flowers needs some help with his presentation too (moustache+bolo, feathers); maybe Kanye can turn him into a project. How about an alternate version of 808 with Flowers instead of Auto-Tone?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Lists | IDOLATOR →
idolator.com
Year-end-list season arrives and Idolator’s Maura Johnston marks the occasion with a discussion of lists recently published by the magazines Blender and Paste. Maura’s objection to the Blender list is that the magazine’s picks are indie-heavy and entirely too predictable, in a way that suggests a deference to consensus rather than the actual opinions of the people who put it together. Or worse, I guess, that maybe those people didn’t bother listening to records that didn’t come with a pedigree.
Maura admits that part of her issue with the Blender list is seeing bands like Death Cab for Cutie show up when favorites of hers, like the new album by R&B singer/songwriter Ne-Yo go missing. She also points out that genres like R&B, metal and country appear to get only token slots on the list.
Meanwhile, in the comments, Idolator contributor Lucas Jensen argues that indie is more inclusive than other genres, and while it may be upsetting that a particular magazine’s list comes off as anemic, it doesn’t necessarily imply that the system is diseased. What if he just doesn’t like Ne-Yo, no matter how hard he tries? Can you argue with taste?
What if the problem isn’t taste, but hype fatigue? And not only on the part of Maura Idolator, but Blender’s listmakers too? The speed of the hype cycle, plus the fracturing (or flattening) of the traditional critical hierarchy, plus the poptimist assumption that all genres should be judged on that level playing field (Ne-Yo = Death Cab = Taylor Swift), puts critics in a bind at least two ways. First, it’s increasingly difficult to give more than a cursory listen to anything but a tiny sampling of what comes out in a given year, and even if a friend (or blogger you trust) tells you they love something, there’s no guarantee it’ll be a match for your taste. Second and maybe more important, the internet makes it incredibly easy to know, well before the end of the year, which artists have built on their initial hype, and which have been buried by theirs. The odd critic showing love for Ruby Suns or the Cool Kids just isn’t going to buoy them up into a list of the year’s 25 best. Which could explain why the center of Blender’s aggregate couldn’t pull away from the obvious picks, and why Maura didn’t find anything on the list that surprised her.
Anyway, the issue of consensus gets more vital as the critical community fractures, and it’ll be interesting to watch what happens when Idolator puts out its critics poll at the end of the year.
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back in the usa
Did anything happen while I was gone?
4 hours in the Louvre leads to tired, hungry Jacob leads to no small amount of crankiness. Maybe “Ain’t That Pretty At All” would have been better.
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Solo Louvre today. Got there early enough that the upper floors of the museum were pretty empty for a while. It was nice and quiet. Had this music stuck in my head on a loop for hours.
Stayed up until 6am to watch election returns and Obama’s speech in the little apartment. Now that this whole thing is over we can get back to what’s really important, like playing “Circulate” to death instead of “My President is Black.”
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Built to Spill “Kicked It in the Sun”
Rachel took me to see Built to Spill at La Maroquinerie last night. About halfway throught he show, I thought, “man, they’re playing a lot of songs from Perfect From Now On.” It wasn’t until they started playing “Kicked It in the Sun” that I realized they were playing the whole album straight through. The record’s more than a decade old, but the band sounded dead on last night. Better than I’ve ever heard them. With the rotating cast around Doug Martsch, it’s hard to know whether he just had the right group playing with him. But BTS always walked a line between indie and classic rock, I like the idea that 11 years in, Martsch has actually grown into these songs.
The crowd was a pretty good mix of young and old. Younger fans included a leather-jacketed punk kid in the front rown who kept woooohooing through the guitar solos. La Maroquinerie is a tiny club - we could hear his voice cracking from the back of the room. There was a wavy-arms dancing girl in a rainbow knit cap at the front too. Given all the beards and 9 minute songs, you’d think BTS would be perfect for hippies, but Doug Martsch constantly shifts from groove to weird sounding guitar noodling and back. I imagine it’s pretty frustrating if you’re trying to space out.
Also in attendance: a guy who looked exactly like Eliot Spitzer. The guy was such a dead-ringer it was eerie. I mean, unless Spitzer himself got busted, resigned, and moved to Paris to attend indie rock shows.
Oh yeah. They closed with the cover of “Paper Planes.” Paris didn’t really know what to do with that one.
me: Ian says to say hi to wifey.
R: Who’s the one going to work? Tell Ian you’re the wifey.
